Turns out that being a stubborn cow who always does things her way is not always a brilliant idea. I always contact publishers after I finish a book out of a misguided sense of pride, and that’s dumb. For instance, I know that with American publishers the expected length of a literary criticism book is 90,000 words, which comes to about 220 pages in print. So that’s what I did with this Ukrainian book.
Of course, today I discovered that 90,000 words with a Ukrainian publisher comes to 400 pages. Why I didn’t try to find out in advance is a mystery.
The publishers have taken the book for peer review. I was so terrified of talking to them that I broke out in zits, giving me a weird, adolescent look. Given that I had no zits in actual adolescence, this was unfortunate.
The first thing I did after the conversation ended half an hour ago was start working on the next book, which will be on contemporary American literature. I want it to come out before the election. It’s doable since I now know that it should half the length of the book on Spain. I have a great idea for it. After that I want to do contemporary Latin American literature for Ukrainians, and then I’ll calm down. Hopefully, the zits will disappear by that time, too.
Clarissa's Blog 
All this tells me is you could end up publishing a nice six-book boxed set series.
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I’m also going to donate 100 copies to the Armed Forces, and soldiers can throw the volumes at the enemy, which will take the evil bastards out on sight.
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There’s a consideration you haven’t considered which could be considerable. 🙂
If you’re not used to the feel of a language, especially how you can omit words in cases where they’re redundant or odd window dressing, then it’s possible you could write far too many words to cover what you want to cover.
“… and soldiers can throw the volumes at the enemy …”
Oh, do be careful where you go with this.
I can already see the book that defies being read: it’s bound in titanium nitride coated razor blades, guaranteed to leave nasty, hard to heal cuts, and the spine contains a movement activated spring launcher that fires a hardened tungsten dart at the reader. The pages are a materials engineering wonder, and you’ll wonder how you still have any fingers left after flipping the first few pages of a flexible ceramic that’s sharper than most knives.
I can also see the book written about the people who dare to read that book, so there’s that.
It has a certain Damien Hirst feel to it, doesn’t it?
“So James, what is it you do for a living?” 🙂
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“you can omit words in cases where they’re redundant ”
Ukraine has a similar cultural profile to countries that border it and the idea of omitting unnecessary words…. is not a thing. Instead, the idea (found not only in Eastern but Southern Europe as well) is that if it’s important and scientific then it needs to sound important and scientifc and that means sentences need to be long and complicated….
Also, the many (very, very many) inflectional endings of Slavic languages mean that simple short sentences tend to sound…. dumb. The structure shines better in longer and more complicated sentences (sounds weird but… that’s how it is).
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I’ve struggled a lot with the word order when I was writing. I feel that something is wrong and my word order is very Anglo but I don’t always know what would work better. And, God, I’ve struggled with the bloody declensions. And participles. It’s embarrassing but I’ve clean forgotten some of the declensions.
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This more or less solidifies the point.
Jack London kicked off the trend in modern English, George Orwell codified it and turned it into a treatise that writers in English are more or less obligated to read, and it’s gone on from there.
And so Clarissa must commit acts of sesquipedalian structure in Ukrainian that would be hopping around on a borrowed leg in English.
But it does explain a tendency.
Jack London: I think I’ll get straight to the point.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: That looks like an attractive scenic route, I think I’ll take that instead and spend a few ponderous hours in the park, feeling out the psychological tendencies of my characters while I sip lazily on a beer, which is all too welcome on such a hot day as this, which reminds me of the time when …
Yeah, I look at it as an aspirational goal, not a hard truth. 🙂
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Every thought I’ve been repressing for years burst out in that book. 90,000 words are nothing. I could keep going and going.
Yes, all of my repressed thoughts are related to Spanish literature. I’m weird.
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They’ll push back on 400+ pages, and it’s about bindery.
This is a good lesson in the economics of printing physical books.
The short version: go find a 400+ page book in your library, then compare how the edge binding looks to a roughly 220 page book.
With that, let’s go for the longer version.
If you think of books as assemblages of mini-books, then the 400+ page book is assemblages of mini-books bound into larger mini-books that may then be sewn together into things that require heavy amounts of bindery glue and a separate backing material for flex, whereas the 220 page things may be edge bound with glue and set without all of that complexity.
So you are making it more difficult for your publisher to sell your works at something they can consider a decent profit and you are also cheating yourself out of being able to publish more books with what you already have.
But it’s one thing to hear it from a Crackpot, it’s another to hear it from the publisher.
Ask them how hard it is to bind that 400+ page book you’ve sent them.
You may find the costs of binding get passed on to you in the form of lower royalties.
Always remember you write for other people, including your publisher, and that these people often want to see more books rather than fewer.
So give the people what they want by making life easier for yourself! 🙂
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I know! And I got myself into this bind (pun intended) completely on my own.
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“Dostoevsky”
Years ago I was reading in interview with an author (forget the name) but was russian then living in an English speaking country.
He didn’t write in English because he never had enough room (paraphrasing) a newspaper or magazine would like an analytical piece by him but it has a limit of 3000 words while he could barely write in introduction with that few…
The elaborate vs language question is one of the language/culture divides of Europe. The Scandinavians are even more into plain language than English speakers and give awards for bureaucrats who can write in plain and easy to understand language (I thought this was folklore until meeting a Swedish guy who’d won such an award).
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Hjalp! I’ve been moderated! 🙂
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Sorry, it’s as unpredictable as it’s annoying.
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Dostoevsky.
There, I said it. 🙂
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“participles”
Polish, thankfully, and partly to make up for insane morphophonemic changes that run through everything else, has a very simple participle system, nothing like the complicated mess of russian participles (are they all really used?)
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