I finished White Night yesterday. Its obvious at this point that there will be a sort of overarching plot, but I'm concerned about how long it will take to resolve.

I can see on wikipedia that there are 2 more books planned to be released so far (Ghost Story and Cold Days). Are those the last two books, or will Jim Butcher be milking this series for as long as possible? I'm tired of "monster of the week" format stuff, and I'm hoping that the series has an eventual conclusion.

Don't spoil anything for me, I just want to know if the books start addressing the overall plot (Black Council and the war and what Lash says near the end of White Night) more. It seems like the last few I read are starting to get more into it, but it still seems like a small amount per book.

 

20 books, plus an apocalyptic trilogy to finish it off.

 

There is your answer. About ten more books, the last three being something legen - wait for it - awesomedary!

 

Damn, I had hoped it was getting close to a resolution. Well at least now I know for certain there will be one eventually.

I wish I had waited. I read the first two (and the reason I got into it is cause of Demon's Feign Merlin's Pain by Nuhuh), and then got sidetracked and waited a long time.

In the time between the end of classes and start of finals, I was like "yeah, I can read a book or two and still have time to study", but then I got fucking sucked in and wasted LOADS of time reading these. I was always like "Yeah, I'll just read a few more chapters.... maybe I'll finish this book... just a few chapters of the next book..."

Now I'm going to have to choose which test tomorrow I'm going to study for, and which one I'm going to fail.

---------- Post automerged at 05:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:18 PM ----------

I just realized I actually did the same thing last semester with Jim Butcher's other series, Furies of Calderon.

Fucked up on a project that I had "plenty of time" for because I started reading them and didn't stop. I need to change my habits.

 

Too right, you got served. But don't be too down about this because Dresden Files are fucking awesome, I can't wait for Ghost story to come out.

 

In other words, we'll be waiting something like 15 years for the series to come to a resolution. This fills me with despair, going to find fanfic to drown myself in.

 

He's been releasing like, 2 books a year. So I dont imagine that it's going to take 15 years, more like 6 or 7 I'd Imagine.

 

He was releasing them two a year only before he started doing Alera. Now that that's finished, he may get back to doing that, but he may also start a new series soon.

 

Go read the Wiki entry again - last time two came out in a year was 2001. Of course, since then it's been a matter of alternating with another series - Dresden in the first half of the year, Codex Alera in second. With that done, there's a rumour that two Dresden books will be out this year, but there's another series that needs work - U.S. Marshals, or something like that.

Edit: Fucking ninjas!

 

I'm trying to figure out how he works so fast - any decent writer can pump out 1k words/hr after a month of practice, but you'd spend twice that time editing it into something decent, then send it off to your actual editor...

 

I'm still not finished reading, but the 8th book (I finished the 9th last) where Molly gets in trouble is very monster of the week-ey. At least until the very end, where it very suddenly plops down a chunk nice interesting plot development. I just couldn't bring myself to really care about the whole fetch subplot, which was the main portion of the book.

White Night was a lot better about it, and it felt like it was continuing to move stuff forward.

 

Yeah, books 10-12 are pretty good about that.

 

The average novel is about 60k words, right? So that's 60 hours right there. Lets say that's about two weeks worth of work, assuming you plop in another 10 hours a week managing your career (a conservative guesstimate), to write the preliminary draft of a novel. Then you spend 120 hours (using your estimates) refining it for an editor. That means that you can produce your first submitted draft, theoretically, in about six weeks. When the editor goes through your manuscript, it usually takes about a week for him to do a full edit and really digest what you're doing.

There may be conversation during this week as to what's going on, but theoretically (you'll note I keep using this word), you could be working another book in this time period, and getting about half of the preliminary draft done. Most authors, however, are sane. They use this week as downtime to focus on such niceties as doing chores, paying bills, and dealing with all the bullshit life brings.

Then you get that draft back. You fix it up, from what I've seen it takes about a week to do this, and you send it back. The editor gets it back to you in about two to three days, since they're really only checking to make sure their changes work. Rinse and repeat X times. Eventually, the number of changes required dwindles to zero, and you have your final manuscript.

Going by the estimates I've made, the editorial process should take about two months for a novel that size (Obviously, the figures would increase exponentially as the word count rises, look at Rothfuss and Martin as examples). This brings it up to a grand total of 3.5 months, which means that you could produce 3.428... 60k-ish word novels provided you did nothing but write 1k words a day, every day. Dresden Files books tend to be around 50k words, I think, which makes doing two novels a year very plausible. Impressive, but plausible.

 

Changes was over 140k words, and I don't recall the other books being that short (50k) either.

 

Yeah, the first HP book was 76k words and it's shorter than most of the DF books. I don't know if my editing estimates are bullshit or what because I rarely do heavy editing, so either it doesn't take nearly as long as I think it does or Butcher writes a lot faster, which is difficult to believe. He even had a thingy on his website which detailed his writing process, and it showed that he basically had the entire plot done, all the characterizations complete, all of the minor plot points finished before he even started writing a book.

....egad.