Embracing the Fiction Author Journey

75. Book Talk: The Quicksilver Conundrum – Editor’s Eye, Reader’s Heart

• Erin P.T. Canning

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 12:47

Ever wonder what makes a massive novel like Callie Hart's Quicksilver tick … or maybe a struggle? 

Join Erin P.T. Canning for a fascinating dual review, breaking down this popular book from both a writer/editor's analytical perspective and a reader's honest opinion.

In this episode of Embracing the Fiction Author Journey, Erin dives deep into Quicksilver. You'll hear insights on plot structure, character arcs, industry guidelines, and Erin's personal reading experience with this captivating, yet challenging, book.

What you'll discover:

  • The Anatomy of a Massive Book: Insights into Quicksilver's number of chapters and total word count, and thoughts on the placement of pronunciation guides and the surprising absence of specific pages.
  • Word Count & Industry Standards: A breakdown of Quicksilver's estimated word count and how it compares to the typical book length recommendation for new fantasy/romantasy authors.
  • Inciting Incidents & Character Goals: Analysis of how Quicksilver handles the inciting incident and character motivation within the crucial first few chapters.
  • The Reader's Journey: Erin's honest struggles with the protagonist Saeris's anger and the male lead, Kingfisher, in the first half of the book, and why she continued reading.
  • The Impact of Book Size on Pacing: How the book's length might affect the "enemies to lovers" trope and overall reader engagement.
  • World-Building & Comic Relief: Highlights of the phenomenal world-building and the essential comic relief provided by secondary characters.
  • The Value of Persisting: Why, despite initial struggles, Erin’s glad she finished reading the book, leading to excitement for the sequel.

Mentioned in this episode: 

Connect with Erin P.T. Canning: 

Send us Fan Mail

READY TO TAKE YOUR WRITING FURTHER? 

Join our Patreon community and access our vibrant Discord writing group to get writing prompts, participate in sprints, download free resources, and more: 
https://www.patreon.com/erinptcanningeditor

Hey friend. So the fandom seems kind of divided on their feelings about Quicksilver, and I'm curious to know where you landed. And I'll share in a minute on where I landed. In this episode, I'm going to review Quicksilver, both from an editor slash writer perspective and from a reader perspective. Bear with me through the writer part of this because I think you'll find that my reaction or my opinion from a reader might have something to do with what I noticed from the editor-writer perspective. Welcome to Embracing the Fiction Author Journey, the podcast that helps writers pursue their author dreams. I'm Erin PT Canning, and I'm an author and editor, a book coach who's been at this for 20 years, and my mission is to help you own your identity as an author, no matter where you're at with your writing. Hey friend, welcome back to the show. Same podcast, different title. Let's get started on Quicksilver first from the writer's and uh, editor's point of view. I wanted to break this down a little bit. This massive book is 45 chapters. It is 609 pages. It has the pronunciation guide right up front rather than in the back with appendices, which makes a lot of sense because my own pronunciation guide is in the back of mine, and I'm always like, huh, I hope that people see that. Um, but on the flip side, when I was reading the Kindle version of this, because it automatically opened up to chapter one, I had no idea that there was a pronunciation guide in this. And I wish I had seen that sooner. There's also a simple map in this book. There is no table of contents in this book, um, which blows my mind as a reader, but really as an editor. Also fun random fact about Table of Contents, even though we call them table of contents, in your documents, you just label it Contents. Drives me insane when I see people actually spell out Table of Contents. Anyway, I had to flip through and verify that there were 45 chapters. Another thing that's interesting about this one is that there's no back matter. There's no call to action at the end of the book. There's no acknowledgements, and there's no about the author page. I don't know what to say that as an editor and book coach. That kind of floors me. I would never make that recommendation to any of my clients. I mean, everybody can make their own decisions. You know, we have these guidelines in place to kind of set a standard. And you can choose to do something different. I am not entirely sure why those pieces are missing. Does it hurt the book? No, not really. I mean, it is 609 pages. Another fun fact about this book is that the author, Callie Hart, she was an indie author, and then her success for this book led to publishing houses bidding for her book. Congratulations to her. I mean, that is absolutely phenomenal. Another fun fact about this book, I wanted to try to figure out how many words this would be for a manuscript. So I applied a technique that I learned in grad school, and you open up to a random page. You count the lines of text on that page. So there were 34 lines, and then I counted the average number of words for a sentence, which was 12. So 34 lines times 12 words per sentence equaled about 408 words per page in the print edition of this book. Then I take the 408 words and I multiply that by the 609 pages of the story, and that gave me a rough estimate of around 248,000 words total. Now, take into consideration the fact that chapter start pages are like half a page, and then you've got dialogue pages where there's a lot less text. So I rounded down a thousand words basically to round 247,000 words. Now, this is what I find interesting about this. Typically speaking, the rough recommendation for new fantasy or new romantasy authors is for your manuscripts to average around 100 to 120,000 words. That means that Callie Harts book was twice the recommendation. Twice. Now, why is it that we recommend to a 100 to 120,000 words? It's because as new authors, we are asking readers to take a chance on us, to invest in us, and if they see something that is massive, that can be a bit of an undertaking, especially if you don't have a record yet of proving that you are going to write the next book and you are going to actually finish this series. So it's less intimidating and less expensive usually for a reader to take a chance on an, on an unknown author if it's between a hundred to 120,000 words for say, fantasy, fantasy romance. However, as I said, these are guidelines, and you can choose to do different. It pays to know what is recommended, and then you can make an informed decision to do something different. I give Cali Hart credit for the fact that she wrote 247,000 words for this book. I, that's impressive. So whenever we give these guidelines, we're not saying, oh, you can't do that. But it's definitely interesting to be aware of that, and to have an example of someone who chose to write the story she needed to tell, and it was twice the typical recommendation. So congratulations again to her on that. Couple more things on the writer, editor side of things. We also typically recommend that the inciting incident take place between chapters one and three, and in Cali Hart's book in Quicksilver, the inciting incident happens in chapter one. And that is when Saeris is stealing the palace guard's golden glove. The inciting incident is usually an external event that makes it impossible for our character to continue to live their lives the way that they had been up until that point. It is something that influences and sets them on a different path. So, here we've got Saeris stealing the palace guard's golden glove, and that's it. She can't go back to her regular life because the guards are gonna be hunting her and her family and her life is going to change. Given the fact that there's 45 chapters, and this is a massive story, she still managed to get the inciting incident, in chapter one, so kudos to her. We also recommend that within the first one to three chapters, you show that your character wants something. It doesn't matter if whatever it is that they want changes down the road. In fact, most of the time it is going to change what they want. You know, in the beginning of the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy just wanted to save Toto. And by the time she's in Oz, all she wants is to go home. So what they want will change, but you want to show them wanting something.'Cause we need to have a reason to root for these characters that we're cheering them on, and we want to invest in continuing to read to see if they actually get what they want and if it was actually what they needed in the end. Another thing that we show between the first one to three chapters is the ordinary world, the life they had before the inciting incident that changes everything. It was interesting though that she actually showed us the ordinary world after we got the inciting incident. So again, she kind of turned things around on us, but still achieved all of those little, uh, check marks for things we want in our manuscripts. As for the book itself, from a reader's perspective, I have a confession. I really struggled to get into this book, and it's a personality thing. The reviews that I've seen for this have been very divided. I didn't really look into why people were divided on it. So just my perspective as a reader, I struggled with how angry Saeris was, which to be fair, if you look at my own main character, she's very hopeful even when she's in the face of everything. So maybe it's just, I've been in my main character's head for such a long time, I had a hard time jumping into somebody who was angry all the time. And of course, Saeris has justified in all of her anger, but still that was just something that I struggled to identify with. Overall, I would say that the biggest struggle that I had with this book is that for about the first 50% of the book, and this is a big book, so that's a big 50%, the main male character, Kingfisher, he is a butthead. He is just so mean to our female main character, Saeris. There were some moments that were hysterical with the tension between them. Like there's a scene where she's eating something, and he's kind of like swallow it, and she starts choking. I laughed out loud for that one, but man would, I wouldn't have given four more of that kind of tension between them. He was just such a mean guy in the first half of the book. Um, and so I wasn't rooting for them as a couple. In fact, I really just wanted her to kick him in the somewhere and walk away, or at least, you know, go embrace her destiny with somebody else watching over her all the time. I really struggled with that. So I went back and I reread the description of the book, and I was like, okay, okay. This is gonna get good. I believe it. I believe it. And I kept on going. And then by around the 50% point, and I still was not enjoying Kingfisher at all, I wound up having to go online and read all of the spoilers for the book. I feel so bad sharing this out loud. I read all of the spoilers for the book because I was like, give me something in here to latch onto, and the spoilers were amazing for like the second 50% and especially the last 25% of the book. And I was like, well, that sounds amazing. I wanna get to that. So I kept reading, and sure enough, absolutely loved the, especially the last 25% of the book. Like that blew me out of the water. I was like this is fantastic. And I am genuinely excited to read the second book, and I genuinely am rooting for Saeris and Kingfisher, and I love how their story developed. So, here's some things that I take away from this. Overall, with both of those things in mind, the editor side of things and the uh, reader side of things. Maybe, maybe especially with the division out there with the fandom, maybe it's because the fact that with the books being so massive, it took so long for us to get to that tension, that, the part where we're getting closer to the, uh, enemies to lovers, where we're getting closer to the lovers part of it. And it's not just flat out enemies, and I hate your guts. Maybe with the book being so long, it's just that it took us a lot longer to get there. I mean, think about it, if we were to divide that book in half and have a average sized first book for a romance, that means that by the end of that book, we would still have our two potential lovers hating each other and not really having gotten anywhere in the romantic side of their relationship. So that's an interesting observation. And I, I wonder if that is part of the, um, division that exists in the fandom. In terms of world building, the book was absolutely phenomenal, and I will say that as much as, um, Kingfisher drove me insane or like the, the anger in there, Carrion Swift, I don't know if I'm saying his name right because he is not in the pronunciation guide part of the book, but Carrion Swift, he provides much needed comic relief. And I absolutely adored his character and I can't wait for his story. And I just thank the author so much for injecting that comic relief because he, um, he made me laugh out loud a ton of times, and I love the fact that he created then more of that tension where we're seeing Kingfisher getting jealous that, um, Carrion's, you know, sharing food with Saeris. And Kingfisher, we're finally starting to see some interest from him over there. Of course at the end of the book, we do get the justification of why Kingfisher was so mean for the first half of the book, à la Rhysand giving, uh, the story of what happened with Under the Mountain with Feyre, and I loved Kingfisher for that. But it was a challenge for me to get to that point. I would rather read a book where I don't have to read all the spoilers in order for that to motivate me to continue going on. But I'm glad that I did, and like I said, I'm genuinely excited for the second book to come out. That is my review of Quicksilver, and I hope you found this helpful. Let me know your thoughts. Until next time, happy reading and happy writing. You've reached the end of another episode. Are you aching to write your first book? Don't struggle with getting words on the page. Download my free guide, "Four Steps to Help You Finish a First Draft." Before you forget, go to the show notes right now for the link, and get your copy today.

Head Shot

Erin P.T. Canning

Host