I’ve got three scenes to go. It’s not going to be the full 120,000 words, but it will be as long as it needs to be. And it is, except those scenes, ready to go.
Closing in on the end of the book…
by CJ | Oct 27, 2015 | Journal | 20 comments
20 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
word counts are overrated, aren’t they? Unless you’re getting paid by the word. If you can say it and get the story told in fewer than 120,000 words, I won’t feel “cheated” by not getting those “extra” words. 😀
Woot, the end is nigh! Til the next book ready to be written 🙂
Congratulations!
Go! Go! Go! CJ!
Pretty cool! I can’t wait to read it.
Siss! Boom! Aah!
Delightful news! Worry not about the number of words. After all, we’re not ‘counters.
Hallelujah!
Books should be the length they are, not some arbitrary number. And frankly, I’m sick and tired of books that are 450 pages of book hiding inside 900 pages of unedited drivel. So having you stop when the book is done is a good thing.
I wonder how many people count the words anyhow? 1,2,3,4…199,996 199,997 199,998 hey you’re two words short. I want my money back. 🙂
The most prolific author in the English language was Charles Hamilton (1876–1961). He is said to have published about 100 million words. That’s the equivalent of over 830 novels of 120,000 words.
Never heard of him? He wrote under numerous different pen names, of which the best known was Frank Richards. His output consisted almost entirely of stories for boys’ magazines, particularly The Magnet with its the Greyfriars School stories.
He would churn out a 20,000-25,000 word story every single week, year after year, and decade after decade. And sometimes two or three stories that size a week for different magazines. The Magnet at its height in the 1920’s had a weekly print run of over 200,000 copies.
The quality of his writing is better than you might expect from that kind of output. George Orwell called Billy Bunter “a really first-rate character”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hamilton_%28writer%29
The word count is a simple mathematics.
In the old days, we counted from 280 to 300 words per page, doublespaced, as an average, cross-chceked against a personal average, by the type of story and your personal style.
Now we have the convenience of computers doing it for us at the stroke of a key.
The reason it matters is typesetting. If a publisher is going to put out a book of a certain size and thickness (and boy! do readers complain when a book is shorter than typical!) they need to know a word count, which relates to the number of pages likely.
You may know that book pages are not printed in sequence, but in ‘bedsheets,’ large pieces of paper, which hold two-sided printing in what looks like completely random order, until they are (nowadays) machine-folded into a cluster of sequential pages called a folio (from Latin: folium, a leaf.) A number of folios are stitched together to form the book.
A great deal of figuring and fudging is done to make sure that the last folio does not end up with two printed pages and the rest blank, which would totally puzzle readers. This is why you see variations in book design, re front matter, extra pages, etc, or a decision not to page between chapters, etc.
Likewise word count is a good way for publisher and writer to communicate. I can tell Betsy I’m at 80,000 words, and she has a perfect picture of how far along that is in a typical novel. If I say 80,000 and it’s looking like 100,000, she likewise knows they’ll use a larger typeface and some particular arranging to make a nice package.
Do the Atevi have formulae for making sure larger numbers are felicitous, or do they do like Humans, and say “about” a million, and fudge? What is the cutoff for needing a precise count to ensure good fortune?
Just thank your luck stars that designing and typesetting a book is just a matter of computer settings now. Back in the days of cold lead type and hand presses, a printer only had enough type on hand to set a sheet at a time. Since he was setting type from a manuscript source, estimating what a page was going to be was a bit iffy. And of course the pages typically weren’t printed in sequence, yet narrative continuity and a balanced look to facing pages were still important.
I remember some of the fights among the “textual criticism crowd” as to whether some little short lines at the end of a page were Shakespeare or the printer trying to make the pages come out evenly. (This only from the Shakespeare plays that have more than one primary source of course)
Modern tech has made the whole process a lot more accurate and less painful!
Ms. Cherryh is starting to repeat herself.
While I might complain about some missing words, since it is Ms. Cherryh’s work I know that it will tell a good tale and be well written.
she edited the first post, so there is an additional paragraph at the end of the second post…
I look forward to reading it. 🙂
Which reminds me, I need to pre order Visitor…
I would thoroughly enjoy another short story, Atevi encyclopedia entry or other creative piece such as Geigi’s letter, —was it? — that expanded out another of the recent books. Actually, something from Damiri’s perspective would be fascinating. On the other hand, if you are under such a deadline for finishing the book, presumably the publisher isn’t able to say “and we’re happy to accept another X# of words sorry for the last 15 pages,” etc. whenever you get that finished.
It’s great to hear the book is nearly done. Early congratulations!
So we’re having a close encounter of the spooky kind today. Is that a coincidence? Maybe not! Booahahahaha!