Well, D’uh

I realized about 30 minutes ago what was bothering me about Act II, and why it was not tracking properly.

Most of Act III was really Act IV.

So it was back to the outline, snip, cut, paste.

Much tighter now. Acts I and II are solid, complete. I added more to Chapter 11, to start III out with some reminders, and a faster punch. Added another interlude to kick off Act II (the previous one belongs with the content in Act III), and now is a lot easier to digest.

so I’ve kept my promise of last week, sort of. What is now Act II was indeed completed then, I just had not realized it.

So here’s how it works. A typical printed page has about 40 lines of text, and about 450 words (this is an average that holds true for both hardbacks and paperbacks, depending on type size). Some words are long, and some words are small. Some lines are dense with text, and others are as sparse as one word plus punctuation.

So if you take the averages above and apply them to “Book X” on your shelf, you can get a rough count of the words in it if you multiply pages X 405 (90% of 450, which accounts for chapter beginnings and endings).

Exxample. Harry Turtledove writes big, and dense. I have one of his alternate history Hardbacks here at my desk, and its 488 pages should have ~197640 words. He gets paid an awful lot to do what he does, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the actual word count in that book is over 200K.

Venturing into my hallway, I now select “Book Y,” A trashy adventure novel penned by a nameless author laboring under a psuedonym of the series’ creator. It has 348 pages, but only 29 lines per page. I can use math to determine its approximate page count in Turtledove type (348*29/40 = 252.3, round up), and also its approximate word count (253*405 = 102465). Again, I am not surprised by the length.

The latter takes me about 3 hours to read. The former about 5, were I to simply sit and read straight through.

Manuscript format has some odd typesetting quirks that make it easier for editors to work with. Double spaced lines, Extra spaces between paragraphs, and whole paragraphs are always kept together. AS such, word count is the only real measure you can apply to your progress as you write, but since we have a relatively stable ration of words/pages, we can extrapolate progress to pages.

Today, I wrote about 15 pages of text, but also rearranged an outline, did minor tweaks to the story flow, and corrects even more tiny typing errors that get missed when you got through. It was about 2400 words, and yesterday was about 500.

Acts I and II together comprise about 64K words. Act III has at present two finished Chapters and an interlude totaling 10.5K words. The finished portions of Act IV total just over 10K

So really, I’m just about 85% of a trashy adventure novel, but only 42% of a turtledove.

Not that bad for a hack.

Time for lunch.