Friday, June 8, 2007

Chapter 9 is finished, and a note on word count.

No editing tonight; instead I've been working on new content and some prewriting. Ideas for the next section of the book are really coming together, and I expect to really be able to make fast progress on it. Only 800 words tonight, but more to come soon.

Also, I've adjusted my target back to about 95,000 actual words. Turns out my real goal is 80,000 words based on the old 250 words per page estimation, and so that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 95,000 words based on MS Word's word count feature. Turns out that the estimation based on the count of pages in standard format is what most agents and editors actually expect to see, though. Now that I know this, it's actually fairly apparent on many of their blogs. Take literary agent Jonathan Lyons' comments under this post at his blog.

For now I'm going to keep expressing my progress in actual word count, though, because that seems more meaningful for now:

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
24,941 / 95,000 (26.3%)

No comments: