That's right everyone. 50,000 words. Today's the day.
While I'm pretty stoked to be hitting this milestone [I mean, I wrote all these words?! Where's an interrobang when you need it?] I am nowhere near done. It's occurred to me over the last two months that this story has turned into an absolutely beast and I have no idea what the word count for this first draft will cap out at. Only edits will tell if I end up cutting most of them to prune the story down or if it will become some sort of series. My fingers are crossed for the former but I'll have to let it play out before I know for sure.
At the moment, I'm having a good time torturing Percy and trying to figure out how much more fleshed out another character's appearances need to be since we get most of the lead-up for the overreaching conflict from them. Decisions decisions.
I picked up Anne of Green Gables yesterday to satisfy the random urge I've had to reread it. I haven't read this book since I was little and I never finished the series though I've seen the mini series [which is amazing]. Anne is shelved in the children's section so, honestly, I was expecting a good story but with language suited for children. My memory was way off. Guys, I am having such a good time revisiting this classic! I'm loving Montgomery's descriptions, especially of people and it's impressive to me, in retrospect, how absolutely accurate the casting was for the mini series. They got these characters so spot on that I can only believe they were born for the parts.
One of the biggest surprises for me was the level of the vocabulary, not only in Anne's characteristic speech, but throughout the narration as well. I feel like language like this is less common in children's literature in recent years and it's got me wondering. Did children on average use to read at a higher level or are parents less involved in their children's reading now so they are less often available to teach and explain words they don't recognize? Learning words through reading has always been more instructive and long-lasting an education for me than those lists you'd have to memorize in school. If it's true that we aren't challenging children with new words as much in the books they read as they used to be are we doing them a disservice? I don't agree with injecting a story full of long and intimidating synonyms just for the sake of sounding pretentiously intelligent but as much as a good book teaches us something about people and life, isn't it also a prime opportunity to teach language?
I suspect most of these questions will go unanswered but I do know one thing for sure, I need this series in my personal library. Because it's amazing and because I want my future children to be exposed to literature like this. Where the heroine is different but not in the "oh, why am I so much more beautiful than everyone else? it's such a burden. I just want to be plain" crap way that we see so much in literature right now [I am looking at you YA]. Anne is lovable despite of and because she is so flawed. I think some people are afraid to write characters as flawed as she is but I think short-changing your characters at the start like that limits the amount of growth you can get out of them.
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