Word Counts

"To write one original short story per month." That was a last-minute bullet point I threw into this year's list of goals, but as of May it seems to be the main focus. I can't finish a whole short story each month because sometimes said story is so long that is has to be broken up into a few chapters, making it more of a story-arc than a short story. That being said, I am six* chapters in since starting last December, which puts me a little ahead of schedule. For the first time, I'm starting to think about word counts.

*"Wait, six? I've only seen four out of you!" Well, two more are in rough draft state awaiting proofreading, but I expect one or two more chapters out of this arc. By the time I'm done I'll be dropping three or four edited chapters on you all at once for the reveal of a full arc.

100,000 Words

...the average word count for science fiction and fantasy novels generally lies between 100,000 and 115,000. --Reedsyblog

I mean, sure I just snatched the first result off Google for "word count for average fantasy novel" but this is approximately what I've heard all my life. Novels, especially fantasy novels, tend to be between 75-100k words long. This is a genre meant to hook you fast and sink you deep into another world and keep you there for longer-than-usual periods of time. It has to be larger than life and so other that you forget where you're sitting.

As a reader, it takes me a week or less to bolt one down. As a writer, it's taken me almost twenty years to get a realistic glimpse of that finish line in my own future.

40,000 Words

My first try at a novel was a supernatural view of the events in the Holocaust called Abba's Daughter, and it froze on the vine. I remember going to the Mt. Hermon Christian Writer's Conference at around twelve years old and presenting a few chapters of my tale to various editors and agents for critique. It came back with positive comments and a few requests for a solid book proposal.

I cannot tell you why I locked up and never wrote more after that conference. I can speculate. Maybe, for the first time, I got a glimpse of what pressures awaited me. Maybe I was afraid I wasn't good enough. Maybe I just had no idea how to navigate the process of book proposals, contracts, and deadlines and refused to participate in the process of failing your way to knowledge. It had to be perfect on my first try, because if it wasn't then I was a joke and I'd blown my one and only chance. Maybe it was all that, or maybe it wasn't. Whatever the case, Abba's Daughter exists only as a few files on my computer and a printed collection of disparate chapters on my shelf.

The Keep came about in my college days. I was often inspired by the strange, whimsical, sometimes dark artwork that I stumbled across on Deviantart. I wanted to write about fairies trying to live together in a little community that was threatened by an encroaching darkness. I spent the next ten years writing and re-re-re-writing the first 40,000 words. Every few years I would pick it up again, find some new angle or twist, and try again. Every time it died under my hands at around 40,000 words. I hit a block. I hit something that didn't make sense. I didn't know where to take the story. Characters weren't behaving. I had outlined every step of this story and it had to be a certain way, but it didn't ever work like it needed to.

I have a better understanding of why this story never went anywhere. With all my outlining and rigid understanding of exactly what needed to happen in the story, I poisoned it. I lovingly enfolded the tale in concrete and when it needed to grow in other directions, it couldn't. In turn, I could not break the concrete and let it do so. The Keep now only exists in disparate files on my computer that are painful to look at or think of.

25,000 Words

As of this moment I am 25,000+ words into The Remara Phenomenon which isn't even pretending to be a novel or a short story collection. It doesn't have a proper box, and maybe that is best because what I need is to explore. It has absorbed fragments from both Abba's Daughter and The Keep and woven them into an entirely new thing.

Because I am exploring instead of Writing A Novel, I'm beginning to get a taste for this world. Last night, for the first time, I closed up a chapter, and instead of deciding that I was on a well-deserved break for a while, I thought, I really need to know what happens next. I wanted to get right back behind the keyboard and keep going.

I've had this happen while writing fanfiction, but it has been many years since I had any affection or excitement for a piece of original fiction I'd put my hands to. I have only the barest idea of where the whole thing is headed. I have a clearer view of individual characters that Remara(s) may meet than how they will interact, and so far following those snapshots has led to stories I enjoy and care about. I look at the arc I am writing right now, about a little voidflyer dragon named Ha'Drak, and I think, I could see this one becoming more than just an arc. This could be a novel in its own right.

I am at just over 25,000 words. If I could make it past 40,000 words this year and still want to keep going... that would be a marker of real change. That would be the taste of hope.