Secret in the Box

The last word of the first draft of Secret in the Box was typed at about 1:50 the morning of Monday, June 11th, 2012, the year the Mayans destroyed the universe...whew...I know that this is really just the beginning of this story, because editing is going to be a nightmare.  It certainly not the story I had originally envisioned.  I had in mind a much shorter, compact story, very fast, very compact, with some very direct messages.  I still want to get back to that, but at the moment I have what amounts to a teen coming of age epic of just shy of 100,000 words, which...okay, most books that are out now, your Harry Potter's and your Game of Thrones, tend to be longer...but its still not a small thing.  With the norm 250 words/page, it'd come out to right around 380 pages.  But, of course, even though people like longer books, I really feel I should be able to tell this story in 200-250 pages...in fact, right where I think I should be approaching the end, suddenly it turns out I'm halfway done...well, no, it only feels that way.  Its actually closer to 1/3-1/4 left at that point.  Still, I want it to be shorter.  I just feel it went on too long, got too complex, and lost a lot of the naive charm that it originally had...honestly, I didn't want it to be 'coming of age' because he's not an adult, he hasn't come of age, he's just moved past one specific hurdle. Rewrite, fuck.