This fight scene is, in my opinion, a lot more fun that the previous one. It’s what I want—quick, dramatic, and shows off character by the way that the various people approach the fight.
I probably should have cut this scene, honestly. The book is a little too long. It’s 250,000 words, where both Elantris and Mistborn 1 are around 200,000. I worried about this, particularly since the original Well of Ascension was only around 235,000, but we added 15,000 through editing to make the pacing work.
Regardless, when this beast got in, the people at Tor (the typesetters and the like) immediately raised a warning flag. However, some of the things they said surprised us. They said that the hardback for Mistborn 2, by their counts, was going to be over 700 pages long! Well, I knew that the book was a bit longer, but Mistborn 1 was under 500, so they were claiming it was around 40% bigger—and unpublishable.
My editor went to bat, claiming that 1) It was only really about 20% bigger and 2) That didn’t matter, because the book was the right length—it worked well, and was paced well, and that he didn’t want to cut it. We caused a big mess of various people arguing, and then finally the people down in production called up and said they’d done a re-assessment, and that the book would be around 560 pages or so. Very doable.
I don’t know where those extra 140 pages went. If you find them, let me know…
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