Hello Hello Hello!
So the big news first, I finished the book yesterday! I’m sure in the coming weeks I’ll have more to write, more to edit, and just more to do in general. There’s every chance that when the book is done, it’ll actually be less than 50,000 words, and I’m okay with that.
Before we get to the statistics, and pretty graphs, I wanted to talk about some books that I enjoy that are actually below this 50k standard that seems to be bandied about. One of the first adult mysteries I read was Robert B. Parker’s The Godwulf Manuscript. This book is a great character introduction, and clocks in around 45,000 words. Another favorite, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope clocks in around 49,000 words. The last example I wanted to share is Fahreinheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, at around 46,000 words. These are all great books, and I highly recommend them.
Alright, so now the interesting pieces. We see in figure 1 the total words plotted in time, as well as the average daily word count needed to hit the 50k mark. It’s pretty clear that I had a solid average besides the first three days, and the last day. That is even easier to see in Figure 2, below.
I’m very pleased with my pacing this year, and feel I could have done even better if my plotting had been a little stronger to begin with. It also didn’t help that this year’s election cycle was a little intense, and made it hard to focus. Before next year, I intend to write another book, probably around the same length as this first one. I’m looking to see if what I’ve learned in plotting out my books will help both my pace, and the quality of the story.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking into publishing my book through IngramSpark, which I can do at a great discount as a NaNo winner. Next week, I’ll discuss how my editing research has gone, and my search for a cover artist. I’ll be trying to coerce some of my friends to be Beta Readers, so hopefully the editing process can begin too.
Keep reading everyone!
~Stephen
McMillan Writes 