The novel is long. Not unusually long for the genre — epic fantasy and science fiction routinely run to 150,000 words — but long enough that you feel the weight of it differently than a short story or even a novella.
The main problem with long-form is not the writing. It’s the memory. By the time you’re writing chapter twenty, you’ve forgotten what you established in chapter three. Not the big things — those you remember — but the small ones. The detail that will matter later. The name of a minor official. The colour of a wall.
I’ve been building a worldbuilding document alongside the manuscript. Every character, every place, every invented term goes in there the moment it appears. It’s become its own artefact — a sort of atlas and encyclopedia of a world that doesn’t exist.
The irony is that the document is now longer than the first draft of the novel.