It seemed to take all week, but I finally finished Part 1 of my Regency romance. I’m pretty excited about it. The female main character’s life is kind of in shambles right now, despite some good news she received. One male lead ran away from everything, and the other got shot down and needs to figure out what to do. I might need to add a scene or two, but for now I think I’ll leave it where it is and advance to the Part 2.
But finishing it brought on some interesting questions. The first part is almost 64,000 words long… And I feel like I don’t have a ton of stuff to cut. Maybe words, but I at least don’t have many scenes to cut, because I try really hard to not have fluff or filler scenes. (Which is actually hard when writing romance, I’ve decided. The flirting scenes tend to feel a little fluffy.) Romance books tend to be around 70,000 words on the short end… Which means half of my book is almost as long as a full novel. Oops.