The chronicles word counter!

[Anne Martin]

Novella: The Book of Cyrus
Genre: Epic Poetry
Word Count: 12,443
Status: This is essentially the bible of The Cult of Hahn. I got through National Poetry month writing a section each day, essential tripling the length of what I originally had. I'll be lucky to get it over 20K. I may take a break on it. Writing so much narrative in verse was a bit oppressive.

 

[Anne Martin]

Novella: The Book of Cyrus
Genre: Epic Poetry
Word Count: 13,221
Status: As you can see, it is going very slowly. I'm no longer working on it every day.

Instead, I have started trying to finish ...

Novel: Out of the Frying Pan
Genre: Science Fiction
Word Count: 35,927
Status: This was the first (and only) piece that I submitted for critique on Chrons - many years ago. (2012?) Some liked it, others didn't think I wrote enough about the firearms used, which I thought was pretty irrelevant at the time, since they only appeared in the first part of the first chapter, and my character knew very little about guns. (She didn't need to.) Anyway, I have rewritten that passage, and my protagonist is now on the far side of the galaxy in a strange but oddly familiar world, the world of our earliest ancestors. Like The Cult of Hahn, I have thought about this one quite a lot and have it mostly mapped out in my head. I've even written the ending already. I might write the final scene before I go back and fill in a rather large gap. There is one major character that I need to decide how she fits in, but that will come.

 

[msstice]

Jan 26th 2024: 153900 => 101000

May 20th 2024: 101000 => 120869

It's like being on a damn diet. It keeps creeping back up. Jokes aside, I'm happy with how things are going. I'm mostly in revisions mode, though I added one short new chapter that I'm super happy with. The story is now complete. Revising is a lot less scary than writing fresh, but writing fresh is also a lot more fun when it goes well.

 

[Anne Martin]

May 20th 2024: 101000 => 120869

It's like being on a damn diet. It keeps creeping back up. Jokes aside, I'm happy with how things are going. I'm mostly in revisions mode, though I added one short new chapter that I'm super happy with. The story is now complete. Revising is a lot less scary than writing fresh, but writing fresh is also a lot more fun when it goes well.

Although I am quick to report word counts, they are just that, a way to monitor progress. A book takes the number of words it takes to tell a story. One can edit so that it takes fewer words to tell the same (or a better) story, but sometimes you need to add words to better paint the picture. There is no harm in that. Of course, I say that being a person who has no qualms about reading a Murakami novel that's 1000 pages long.

 

[sknox]

Well, I have mine down to about 92k, but I'm writing the final battle scene, so it's going to go up again before I start cutting earlier material.

I work in Scrivener, which sort of encourages creating a new file and starting a different draft of the same scene. Or writing little scenes that maybe make the final cut and maybe don't. But neither the program nor I can distinguish, so it all gets counted as "word count". Rather misleading, but I've never found a better way.

On the plus side, it does give me a sense of project to see the word count come steadily down once I'm well into second and third edit.