Thursday, October 30, 2008

Word counts

I counted up pages and words of my most recent draft. I forget the date of my last count, but whenever it was, I've added over 5,000 words and 21 pages since then, more in Part II than Part I.

I know stand at:
344 pp. and 107,700 words in Part I;
196 pp. and 59,670 in Part II;
another 11 pp. in the epilogue;
to total 551 pp. and 170,700 words for the whole book.

I've tried estimating the word counts of some published books to do a conversion, and at best (i.e. shortest) this could be 450 pp. in hardback. More like 500 pp. For example, I'm looking at the hardcover of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, and I estimate that's about 350 words/page. Divide that into my total word count to get almost 500 pp.

Which is a disaster, I think. It's almost twice as long as I want it to be. How the hell did it get so long? And where am I going to cut? I have no idea.

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