I’m Pondering Word Counts

First of all: I reached the 45k mark for The Circled Green. So hooray for that. My goal is to reach 55k by the end of the month, which means I have to write about 500 words a day. As that’s what I have been writing for the past little bit, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

What I’m finding interesting about The Circled Green is that right now I can’t get a handle on its length. When I wrote my first draft of Blood Bound I used 80k as a guide to how close I was, and when I finished it 80k was the total of that draft.

The Circled Green isn’t like that.

At first I used 70k as the guideline – nice and in the middle.

As The Circled Green went on, and things started moving faster than I originally thought, I guessed it might come down to 60k. But now that other things are happening, and I know I need to go back and add some description and further scenes etc. it looks like it might be up to 80k, same as Blood Bound.

So I guess I’ll just have to keep writing and see how this one goes.



6 Responses

  1. Robbie says:

    I say just let the story tell itself, and word count will end up where it needs to be.

  2. Catherine says:

    @Robbie: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. At the rate this story is going, it won’t be too long (80k is a good guess) as there’s only a few days, in story, left.

  3. WordCount on my current project has been doing a similar dance. (Lovely word count meter by the way – did you write the code yourself, or snag it somewhere?)

  4. Veronica says:

    How many pages is that many words!?

  5. Catherine says:

    @Veronica: Assuming 250 words a page, current total for TCG is an estimate of about 180 pages.

    Doing the same for BB’s 80k, that comes to 320 pages.

  6. Cindy says:

    Have a guideline of the length you would like, but let the story flow. Aim for 70 K but give room of about 20% either side.