World War 1990, George Lucas or Peter Jackson

World War 1990: The Final Storm stands at 85,000 words and we suspect when all is said and done it might bloat up to 90,000.

As noted before this book has three parts, two of them being The Battle of the Polish Plain followed by The Battle of the Three Seas.

We woke up yesterday morning seriously considering axing all of The Battle of the Three Seas. We don't like how big this book is and worry that it feels like a Star Wars prequel.

The Battle of the Three Seas shows naval action across the globe and we think that's pretty cool. But then we hearkened back to the summer of '94. That hot D.C. summer where we had no TV, interned at the White House, and read Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South. Turtledove didn't show action everywhere, but merely hinted at it, mentioning that the U.S.had taken Winnipeg but the British had torched Boston. That was an amazing tweak and we wondered if we shouldn't do the same, cut these chapters, and throw them into the short story compilation we'll do in the near future.

Before pulling the trigger we read over and edited the sections of Part II that need work and they're shaping up nicely.

Then by coincidence another big, long, sprawling and kind of bloated movie was on and we watched it for a few hours. We refer of course to The Lord of the Rings.

LOTR is long, slow, bounces around all over the place, and its one of the greatest movies of the last twenty five years.

So we stepped back from the brink.

Don't cut, fix.