{"id":4969,"date":"2008-12-16T00:59:02","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T05:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=145"},"modified":"2025-08-01T02:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T07:21:07","slug":"what-happened-to-the-epic-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/what-happened-to-the-epic-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"What happened to the epic novel?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, a friend of mine who is reading The Proviso<\/em><\/a> said to me (paraphrase), \u201cYou know, a publishing house editor would have made you cut some of this.\u201d Beat. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know what it could have been.\u201d At 283,000 words, it\u2019s actually right on track for a novel that chronicles the romances of 3 couples. It\u2019s 94,333 words per romance. (No, I don\u2019t know which couple gets more air time, nor does it matter.)<\/p>\n

\"\"A couple of days ago I blithely typed, \u201cI want to be the Tom Wolfe of genre romance<\/a>\u201d and suddenly, the light came on for a few people, one of whom said so in that thread. I had never thought of my writing goals in that light until I actually said it, and that is true. (That\u2019s just blindingly arrogant of me, isn\u2019t it?)<\/p>\n

Anyway, I had the feeling there were only 3 readers (including me) around Romancelandia longing for the long, involved, complex romance. But a Dear Author thread about the shrinking word counts of some of Harlequin\u2019s lines<\/a> (this isn\u2019t unusual) disabused me of the notion. More readers came out of the woodwork to express their dissatisfaction with the snacks that are the single-title romances (and we won\u2019t go into category aka Harlequin romance). We want feasts!<\/p>\n

But alas. There are none.<\/p>\n

Th. made the argument in a provocative post<\/a> that series writing is a different skill from single-novel writing, and perhaps that\u2019s where the epic novel went: to series. That must be read in the proper order to get the whole story.<\/p>\n

I hate that. It\u2019s inconvenient and, from a consumer\u2019s point of view, extravagantly expensive. (And you thought MY book cost a lot of money!) By and large, I don\u2019t stick with series, especially if they\u2019re as intertwined as mine is, but give me an enormous novel that engages me all the way through and you got me and my money in one shot.<\/p>\n

But, you know, it took me a long time to decide whether to split the romances out into 3 books and create a series, or create a long novel. It couldn\u2019t be helped. The structure of the story arc just wouldn\u2019t hold up under the weight of the extra bindings.<\/p>\n

The one epic is more than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\n

Now, would someone else PLEASE write something long and involved? And if you know of any, please let me know what they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, a friend of mine who is reading The Proviso said to me (paraphrase), \u201cYou know, a publishing house editor would have made you cut some of this.\u201d Beat. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know what it could have been.\u201d At 283,000 words, it\u2019s actually right on track for a novel that chronicles the romances of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[531,525,532],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-publishing","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4969"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13973,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4969\/revisions\/13973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}