Half the Way
Word count of the decade: 500,060
Yes, with a recent push on a Stargate novel, I’ve officially half made it to a million words of fiction, in just under four years.
Although my word count was once calculated using a basic application of wc, it’s now maintained in a baroque OmniOutliner file that also tracks what’s fanfic, original fic, published, submitted, in progress, or abandoned - plus dates. (Yes, Colony is still in progress.)
Now that I’ve hit the big 5-0-0(-0-0-0), where do I go from here? The other half of the million words is the obvious answer, but I tend to live in the moment - I can’t have a goal that’s another four years away. On the other hand, 500,000 words is barely a start to a standard fantasy epic. Even Atlas Shrugged is longer, at 645,000 words “by the printer’s count.” (Yes, I think inserting a 55-page political speech into a novel is cheating.)
If I hiked my daily word count from 1,000 to the NaNoWriMo level of 1,666, I could write the other 500k in one year. Or I could write a 900-page political speech…