A Book of Epic Proportions

My existential crisis

Writing history

How long is a book?

Let me tell you about the moment I accidentally launched myself into an existential crisis.

It started because I half-remembered an author talking about cutting fifty pages of a battle scene. Fifty pages. That felt enormous to me. I’m a reader, yes, but I’m the kind who uses bookmarks — not one of those freakishly gifted page-number savants (no offense to the freaks). I also buy chunky trilogies in one volume, so I never actually know how long anything is. With different book sizes and fonts, page count felt arbitrary.

I figured a Word document page was probably smaller than a book page. In my head, a solid fantasy novel was maybe five to six hundred printed pages. So when I hit the halfway point of my own book, I started wondering if publishing was something I should consider.

Writing for myself

Up until then, publishing wasn’t the plan. I wrote this book for me. I write because my brain refuses not to. Words pile up until I let them out. The story became my world, my escape, my way to deal with life while life was being… itself.

But if the world helped me breathe, maybe it could help someone else too.

I’ve never managed an autobiography. I stopped journaling at eighteen. Adulthood arrived and immediately felt like a scam. As a kid, I could face hard things because I assumed adulthood would be better. Then it wasn’t. When you’re not convinced the future is friendly, looking backward isn’t exactly appealing either. So I lived in a fantasy world. And eventually I realized other people might want in.

Letting people in

I finally looked into publishing — and discovered it’s no longer “mail a tree’s worth of printed manuscripts to New York.” It’s queries, websites, agents, platforms, the whole shebang. One step at a time. I started looking into how to query agents for representation.

A query often needs a word count.

I had never once thought about my word count. I checked it. I searched average book counts. Then I rechecked and began checking Harry Potter's word counts. And that’s when the crisis hit.

Because I truly thought I was short.

Spoiler: I was not short.

Being Epic

Apparently I had sailed right past “novel,” blew through “long novel,” and landed squarely in “epic.” Accidentally.

Oops.

The thing is, it didn’t feel long to me. But I’ve lived with these characters for so long that moments fly by. And I kept comparing my book to quieter, slower, cerebral literary novels. Mine didn’t feel like that, so surely it wasn’t long.

But whatever the length ends up being, I’m not cutting the story off at the knees. It ends when it ends — organically, on its own terms. Maybe an editor will trim things one day (assuming an agent survives reading all 300,000 words), but it won’t be me doing the hacking.

Because apparently… I am epic.

And somehow I didn’t notice.