#word counts

[ussjellyfish]

Fanfic Writers!

(it can be a WIP, doesn't have to be published at all)

[irisbleufic]

That's so many words oh my goodness... more than 3 million???

Yep. A few years back when I was interviewed on the Love What You Love podcast, I was only just approaching 3 million. I aim to accrue the 700k-ish needed to hit 4 million over the next few years; I’d like to aim for 10 million over my lifetime, thinking long term. I love that AO3 lets us track these stats!

[ginnyw-potter]

I just crossed the 200 000 words mark on my Knight of Mine draft! 🎉🎉

That is only 125 000 words more than my longest finished fic!

[tc-doherty]

I've only been keeping track of my word count since 2009, but if I keep up the pace that I'm at now I should hit 3 million words next year… That's pretty cool~

[thecurioustale]

Started reading your work recently and am impressed. How long do you think your current two projects will be when finished, in terms of word count?

Thank you for the kind words, anon! You're the first anonymous ask I've ever gotten that wasn't either spam or hating on me. :3

This is a good question, and one that I think about myself. My answer is kind of long so I'm putting the bottom line up top, and please take this with an enormous grain of salt because my crystal ball is a muddy one and so many things can change (up or down) in the editing:

The Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel (working title) will probably be between 300,000 and 3 million words. If I really had to take a wild guess and narrow it down further, probably a little shy of the 1 million mark i.e. the 800,000 – 900,000 range.

Chapter 1 of After The Hero: A Curious Tale is harder to estimate for various reasons but is "probably" going to end up in the 200,000 – 700,000 range.

Okay, so that's the TL;DR. Now for the nitty gritty:

I have no friggin' clue! I have found with past experience that my estimates for this kind of thing are usually bad (and not in a specific direction or way).

A natural pair of questions to ask is: "What word count currently exists?" and "Roughly what percent of completion are these books at?"

The difficulty in my answering the first question is that, with the way my writing process works, I'd have to go and manually look at a bunch of different Word files and add it all up—an attainable chore but definitely a chore, as there are dozens and dozens of these files.

I've been working a lot on Galaxy Federal lately, adding a low tens of thousands of new words to the text just in the past three months. I am noticing lately that I am getting tantalizingly close to being able to stitch together a lot of material into a single manuscript document (or a couple documents), which will give me a much better impression both of my progress this year and much better estimating power as to what the finished book is likely to end up being in terms of length.

I had been holding off on looking at the word count till then, as a milestone reward. However, since I've been curious about this myself, and since someone has asked, I went and did a (very!) rough estimate of the existing manuscript text in the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel. This does not include supporting documentation, worldbuilding documents, etc.—just manuscript text.

As of today that number is currently 192,235 words (in 38 different documents). However, this is high, because I know there is some abandoned text in there as well as some other detritus inside the various manuscript documents that would be very time-consuming to factor out. I'm pretty confident in saying that the true number is close to 170,000, albeit with the caveat that not all of that, by any means, is going to make it into the final book.

The difficulty in my answering the second question—about the completion percentage—is that the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel still has some pretty fundamental unanswered questions and blank zones. I also don't really have a clue yet just how much cutting of existing text is likely to happen in the main editing phase. Probably quite a fair bit. ATH Chapter 1 has far fewer fundamental unanswered questions, but there are still huge areas of the text that haven't begun to get written. Less of it will be cut in editing than with the Galaxy Federal novel, as I have a much tighter grip on the ATH Chapter 1 story and am not writing many sections that are never likely to see the light of day.

A very wild shot in the dark for the percent completion on the Galaxy Federal Novel is that I am between one-ninth and one-half of the way there in terms of the entire project. The more optimistic "one-half" leans heavily on the extensive progress I have already made in world conceptualization, story construction, and the existing word count. The less optimistic "one-ninth" leans heavily on word count projections alone. But I can't stress enough just how wild of a guess this is. As for ATH Chapter 1, an equally wild guess is that I am about one-fourth of the way there, maybe closer to one-half if I again heavily factor in the existing story development and worldbuilding work that isn't directly reflected in the word count.

The good news is that I don't foresee that these rather anemic completion percentage estimates are going to take correspondingly more time in the future than their respective projects have already taken in the past. This is due to so much of the worldbuilding and story construction already being done, and also due to the fact that I have been writing a lot more frequently in the past couple years. If I truly were only one-ninth of the way through the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel, and have been working on it for almost seven years, then at a linear rate it would take me another fifty-five years or so to finish, and that's just not going to be the case. I anticipate finishing both books in this decade, barring personal disaster in my life (which could easily happen), and at least one of these two books is likely to be finished well before the end of the decade.

That's good news for the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel, which is a standalone work, but obviously raises questions about my ability to complete ATH in its entirety in my lifetime. =[

[mslanna]

seeing how the birdapp keeps imploding, trying to get some more of my writing stuff here

June summary. still on track with the yearly word count, worked a little ahead for July which is fine. I'll probably be doing a lot of restructuring on TLG this months and won't get that many words out.

Most words went into TLG and a blog post on phyically interacting with my WIPs.

Mute "mel writes" to not see my writblr stuff 😊👍

[hues-of-purple]

So I know that I’ve done some polls similar to this, but the answers are slightly different…

[author-a-holmes]

The Cat of Knowing

Well in that case... <3

Everyone look at the best motivational tool on the planet?! I would die for Cat of Knowing (and Sleepy, just, fyi) <3

I've managed another 1,182 words since he arrived in my inbox and I credit them all to that furry lil face and Sleepy

[graffiticanada]

Word Counts

[rabidbehemoth]

Liminality sequel

Today’s word count: 1680

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

YOOOOO even with the preliminary additions to this monster scene, i still trimmed net 300 words off it!!!

[disorganizedkitten]

I went through my old docs because I'm prepping for another dc crossover and was, again, laughing at myself because none of my only-dc works seem to ever see the light of day, so I wanted to see exactly HOW many of them I have (pfffttt) and anyway I opened up In The Vacuum You Left Behind which is a Battle For The Cowl rewrite and-

Wheezes

The target word count is 16380. Sixteen thousand, three hundred, and eighty words.

*cackles*

GUYS War Crimes pt. one is 17k. ITVYLB has an outline featuring twenty five installments, and that is ALL before the extra five or so focused on Mari'ander Grayson.

This outline is from like two years ago and I just- it's so obvious I didn't understand word counts? Or maybe it's just like... fandom differences. In ML back when I was doing a lot of it, 70k was long and 100k? Pfft never. 20k was long. Batman? 70-100k, easy, oneshots lowball at 1k and are generally closer to 5-7. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if 200k was the norm for batman but I find it easier to say 150k tops bc I can read that in three days. MHA? Idr all the word counts but the good, long, multichapters are definitely 90-200k, I've seen 300k ones but they scare me.

Anyway the moral of the story is- there is no moral I just want you all to laugh at the fact that I thought I could rewrite Battle For The Cowl in 25 pieces and somehow have it be less than a thousand words an installment.

Because I will be. I will be for a long time.

[irisbleufic]

am i having a stroke or does every single one of your ao3 works have a word count ending in 0, on an even thousand every time even???

Oh, anon. I love it when this observation is dropped in my ask box by baffled newcomers. Rest assured you are not the first 💙

Here’s the rundown, pretty straightforward:

1) Yes, every single work I have on AO3 has a word count ending in 0.

2) Not every work ends on an even thousand or hundred, however…

3) …about 95% of my works written in the last 3-5 years do end on even thousands, whereas anything earlier is a mixed bag of tens, hundreds, and thousands.

Therefore, if you looked at only the first few pages of my most recent works, I absolutely understand why you’d think they were all even thousands. I wouldn’t blame anyone for deciding not to go through all 16 pages of works!

The next question is usually some variation on “Why are you like this?” It’s either a compulsion or a hyperfixation, not gonna lie. I get anxious if I let counts end on anything other than 0. I used to be okay with ending on 5, too, but that was ages ago and not reflected in the AO3 record. Autism/OCD is a weird double whammy.

[pearwaldorf]

This is some cold-ass shit. As President, Biden has to say something. But he can say it in a way that says nothing and everything.

I want to shake the hand of the staffer that wrote this because this is absolutely fucking superb.

I know we (in general but especially neuroatypicals) prefer things to be clear and straightforward. But occasionally, you can do things in full view of the world like this. And that's kind of incredible.

[tc-doherty]

GOAL REACHED!

[gothamxwattpad]

Ayyyyyyyy day four! I’m actually 501 words into chapter five of my first draft of WEAVER.