Summer Word Count? It Changes – daily
Through a Facebook post by another author I was asked what my word count was this summer. I was kind of surprised at my reaction of “Well, it depends.”
First, I don’t know about you but I think my word count for the first two months of the 2018 summer is pretty high – just over 40,000 since June 1st – in the draft of the third book of my sci/fi series (this count does not include any of the newsletters I write, or posts I make on my personal Facebook page, on my business page (TimberDark Publications, LLC), on pages or groups I am an administrator for (Square Dance Etc, The Lloyd Shaw Foundation, and Callers Partners Committee), or the uncounted emails I send out for various entities such as my P.E.O. Chapter. Neither does it include posts here on my blog – which I admit I have been slacking on for the above reasons. I don’t want to count the words on all that other stuff. The important word count, for me, is for the third book of my series. And that changes or at least will change and vary, up and down, on a daily basis once the full draft is done (any day now). I should also let you know that I had planned on writing a classic trilogy for the main story with an optional two additional books for side stories. But when I looked at the number of loose ends and sub-stories that I needed to clean up after publishing the second book I realized that a single third book would easily be over 800 pages. I was adamant about NOT doing that. Book one has 362 pages and book two has 384 pages. So I divided the proposed #3 and choose which story lines to focus on ending and which to continue to the fourth. [image error]
This coming week I hope to complete the full rough draft of the third book. Then, the work really begins. After a day or two of not looking at it at all (I’m challenging myself to do that!), I will go back to the beginning of the document and start editing – aiming to cut 30,000, particularly from the first half of the currently 134,000+ draft, though, if the story needs to be over 100,000 then it will be (I think I can tighten it up enough and hoping to keep it under 400 pages). Such is the life of a writer – write a bunch-cut a bunch-add a bunch-cut a bunch. See-sawing back and forth to create a great story. I actually love this part of the process.
I tried a ‘new’ process on this third book. Start from a para-graphical outline and fill in the scenes to get me from one high point to the next. I entered the word Chapter and inserted one or two sentences about what I thought should happen. Then I went back to the beginning and started filling in. I had to work at not going back and edit each chapter or scene shortly after having written them. I did make notes in margins about questions of who knew what when, spellings of alien names, words that needed to be added to the glossary at the end, etc.
One of my problems is the characters seem to have minds of their own and go off and do or say their thing – they force my fingers to type! Thus, sometimes they come up with crap and sometimes I actually need to pay attention because it is so very good and right. On this draft I have left all of that in – with cautionary notes like “do I really want to go in this direction?” in the margins. So, some of the edits will be fairly easy – I’ll just cut.
But when I looked at my opening notes yesterday, I saw some ideas I am pretty sure were not included but that I think should be. So, editing involves adding words, too. Editing is not just about cutting it’s about making the story better.
So, should I be worried about the higher than anticipated word count on a rough draft? Not necessarily. At least I have plenty to work with and I’m more than comfortable with that. And starting next week the fun/work begins.
When do you start worrying about word counts? Should a series stick to a ball-park figure book to book or is it dependent on how many the words the story needs? Will I have negative word counts – I hope so.
