Stats!

It has been way too long, but I finally have some stats for you.

The original title for this novel was just "Kuzunoha's Story", which changed just before last Nanowrimo to Kitsune-Ken. Kitsune-Ken, while an awesome name, didn't really apply to just this story, so it became my series name. Just last month, the final name I chose suggested itself... Hunter.

Kitsune-Ken (狐県) is the name of a Japanese game. It's basically a type of rock, paper, scissors game, where your choices are Hunter, Fox, and Village Head, though I always remember it better as Lord. The game is played by making hand symbols, like in rock, paper, scissors, but instead of just one hand, you use both hands. To make the sign for Hunter, you move your hands to mimic holding a rifle. To make the sign for Fox, you put both hands up above your head as if they were a fox's ears. To make the sign for Lord, you sit up straight and lay both hands on your legs. In the game, the hunter beats the fox with his gun, the fox beats the lord by tricking him and the lord beats the hunter by being of a higher social class. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is also a version of this where players lose an article of clothing each time they lose a round.

Hunter was originally 175 pages long when finished and was 76,224 words long. The current version is only 169 pages and 65,263 words long. The original chapters were much longer; I only had 34 of them (and one was nearly 15 pages). The current version has chapters much closer to each other in length; about 4 pages average and has 41 chapters.

The first 17k were written during Nanowrimo nearly two years ago. However, I admit that what I'd written was essentially trash and it sat around on my hard drive guilting me into doing something with it. At When Words Collide 2015, I started playing with it again and apparently had sudden realized what was supposed to happen. I worked on that first 17,000 words and applied essentially heavy cutting and editing techniques before nano and cut it down to nearly 10 of words that would need to be re-written, but would do as a starting place. During Nanowrimo, I wrote another 68,635. but somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 of it was notes on characters, places or future storylines that didn't fit within the bounds of this novel.

Kuzunoha is the main character and she has the lion's share of the chapters at 21 out of 41. Richard is the next biggest character in the story with 13 chapters. Skylla has 3 and Jocelin and Himiko both have 2. This means for all of you that want a lot of female viewpoints in your books that about 2/3 of this novel is written from a female viewpoint!

And I think that's where I'll stop. Do you guys have any questions about it?