Though I’m not a fan of word counts as a measure of progress, it did get me wondering about the metrics for some of my longer forms of prose. Here’s a quick summary of my projects:

I was obsessed with the word count for Grail, hence its size. Everyone familiar with the fantasy genre told me it had to be 100K+ to be publishable, so that is what I aimed for.

The other projects grew organically, however. Though it seems Jonathan probably needs a fair amount of pruning based on the genre (75K is more-or-less a high-water mark for contemporary fiction), the irony is that the story still isn’t completely fleshed out! I guess once I get it completed, I’ll have to re-evaluate.

As an aside, Dragon, Old Ways, and Jonathan started as Nanowrimo projects, so each one had the first 50K written in 30 days.