Monday, September 24, 2007

Novel lengths.

I just went to Harlequin's website just to poke around. I think I'm still too chicken to send anything but we'll see. LOL

But anyway, so I've been stressing about the length of my work and feeling that they aren't long enough. I just randomly click on stories from Project Gutenberg and other e-books and do word counts because I want to get an idea of how long a full length novel should be.

Of course, I'm generally disheartened because most often, the stories are over 100K words and some are like 300K+ words. Now, that's a joke if I've ever heard one. I can't imagine writing so many words.

Anyway, most of my O.C. multi-chapter fanfics were about 30-35K words which makes them novellas. The Sam Soon story is about 40K but the 4 'novels' I've completed have been 54-83K words. WFF will probably get about 3-4K more words when I edit, the two Femi's Diary stories will probably get 5-10K words after they've been edited. This will still leave my range about 58-83K words in length.

Consequences is currently at 73K words but will probably get 15-25K more words by the time I'm done. Honeymoon is at 20K and will probably end up at the 60-70K mark.

What's the point if this post? I've been stressing about the lack of length and I think I've actually dragged Consequences quite a bit just for this reason. Only to get to the site and see that their preferences are 50-75K in general. Oh well... not that I'm sending anything to them but it's good to see that shorter novels are also desirable. I guess this means that instead of stressing about length, I should just write the story and it'll be as long as the story deserves to be instead of needlessly dragging it.

I think Consequences has two chapters that I want to expunge but it's only because I waited so long till I got to them. I could probably eliminate 10K words without really changing the story. I am quite dissatisfied with that story.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

your blog is so dry!

Enagwolo said...

And that's just the way I like it.

Elle Woods said...

lol @ nonymous...foolish ppl abound online meyn.