He's only gone and bloody done it!!!

After six months of writing, Adventure Eddy is finally finished!

Weighing in at 126,000 words, Adventure Eddy is by far and away the longest thing I’ve ever written. It’s the origin story of Adventure Eddy. Who he is. Why he’s called Adventure Eddy. Whatever the hell happened to make him the way he is.

Now I have to turn that story into something useable.

You see, 126,000 words is far too long.

I need to edit, trim and crop to a projected 80,000 words. The length of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

In real terms, that means one out of every three words I’ve written needs to go.

Concise is Precise

That sounds pretty harsh. Why is it necessary to trim that much?

Well, I’ll be honest. I’m not a great writer. I think I’m great at coming up with stories and I think that Adventure Eddy himself is a fantastic and important guy. But I don’t claim to be Shakespeare. I write Adventure Stories and, in the process of writing Adventure Eddy, I sat down and told myself to pour everything in my head onto the page.

That means an awful lot of the stuff I’ve written is probably unnecessary.

You see, the whole reason I wrote Adventure Eddy in the first place was to answer some questions I had. I was working on The Bootleg Boys. A story in which Adventure Eddy returns from France with a boot load of duty free booty.

It got me wondering: Why was Adventure Eddy in France in the first place?

That led on to my thoughts about The Rules of Engagement, when Eddy’s sister snapped at him for speaking French. Why on earth did he do that?

Finally, there was the orphaned Adventure Eddy story, French Twist. Eddy was in Paris. He was friends with a policeman called Pascal. That had to fit into the canon somewhere.

It was very obvious that a story needed to be written.

So I came up with Adventure Eddy. The story of a chubby, ginger kid who goes from Winchester to Paris and turns from chubby, ginger kid to unemployable ginger rogue in the process.

That’s the story of Adventure Eddy.

I included everything. I promised myself not to edit mid-flow. Too many times before, I’ve tried to make each and every chapter perfect before I’d written it, but ended up writing myself into a brick wall as I did so.

Jack Kerouac style, I was going to write and write and write and deal with the consequences afterwards.

That’s why I’ve got a story that’s 126,000 words long.

It’s all good. It’s all important. Everything that I wrote happened.

But when it comes to the juice of the story. The good stuff. I can trim, snip, cut and edit and produce something that’s short and concise. Less is more, as they say. The answer to all the questions I’ve written about will be implied in what I finally produce as the manuscript for Adventure Eddy.

Just like every writer, I need to edit the hell out of it.

Maybe, then, I can get it published.

What Now?

Well, Adventure Eddy will continue to be published in all it’s unedited glory on adventureeddy.blogspot.com. There’s another two months of posts there, so I hope you stay tuned.

If not, I will be editing, trimming, hacking, slashing and t-cutting the final manuscript and sending it off to a publisher. I will post on rolandhulme.blogspot.com about that.

In the meantime, now I know the answer to all those questions, I will turn my attention back to The Bootleg Boys.

One thing’s for sure.

You haven’t heard the last from Adventure Eddy.