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A note on word count!
6 years ago
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I want to be clear about word count, and why I measure it like I do.
I typically write in spurts of 250 words. That's how long each 'beat' of a story is. The 'penny a word' therefore is (obviously) about $5 per 500 words, and so 2 beats of the story.
However, sometimes the section will come up either a bit short, or a bit long. Now obviously I don't want to delete a few sentences that were useful just to hit an arbitrary limit, nor do I want to have to throw in a random line of text just to make it so that I hit 250 words instead of, like, 219 or something. I'm trying to write smut, not filibuster on the floor of the Senate, and there's only so many ways to say "His head got crushed in a headscissors" anyway. So in order to avoid repeating myself like a broken record or cutting bits like a movie edited for a TV slot, I'm formally announcing something that I have been (kind of) doing anyway.
While I intend each "Section" for 250 words, I'm allowing myself to either fall 50 words short, or go 100 words over.
That means if you buy a story from me that's $40 for 4,000 words, that that's more of an estimate. There's a (considering how wordy I am, quite slight) chance it could be lower, around 3200 words, and a much BETTER chance that it could reach as many as 5600.
Again, I've never actually written UNDER, but earlier today I was in a situation where I was trying to fit at least 11 words into a section and realized that that doing something like that was, quite frankly, really, really dumb. Especially when the last three sections had broken 280 so I wasn't even behind on word count.
A further point, as I have discussed with some commissioners, the word count of a prior section of story doesn't actually effect the word count you'll get later on. If you purchase 4,000 words from me, and you discover that what I told you would be only the first half of the story has actually taken 2500 and it was really those LAST 2000 words you were more invested in, please don't worry. I'm not cutting 500 words out of the second half of the story to hit my mark and the absolute MINIMUM length of the story from that point on would be 4100. That second half is probably going to take 2000 words anyway, and in fact there's a very good chance that it'll take as much as 2800.
Thank you.
I typically write in spurts of 250 words. That's how long each 'beat' of a story is. The 'penny a word' therefore is (obviously) about $5 per 500 words, and so 2 beats of the story.
However, sometimes the section will come up either a bit short, or a bit long. Now obviously I don't want to delete a few sentences that were useful just to hit an arbitrary limit, nor do I want to have to throw in a random line of text just to make it so that I hit 250 words instead of, like, 219 or something. I'm trying to write smut, not filibuster on the floor of the Senate, and there's only so many ways to say "His head got crushed in a headscissors" anyway. So in order to avoid repeating myself like a broken record or cutting bits like a movie edited for a TV slot, I'm formally announcing something that I have been (kind of) doing anyway.
While I intend each "Section" for 250 words, I'm allowing myself to either fall 50 words short, or go 100 words over.
That means if you buy a story from me that's $40 for 4,000 words, that that's more of an estimate. There's a (considering how wordy I am, quite slight) chance it could be lower, around 3200 words, and a much BETTER chance that it could reach as many as 5600.
Again, I've never actually written UNDER, but earlier today I was in a situation where I was trying to fit at least 11 words into a section and realized that that doing something like that was, quite frankly, really, really dumb. Especially when the last three sections had broken 280 so I wasn't even behind on word count.
A further point, as I have discussed with some commissioners, the word count of a prior section of story doesn't actually effect the word count you'll get later on. If you purchase 4,000 words from me, and you discover that what I told you would be only the first half of the story has actually taken 2500 and it was really those LAST 2000 words you were more invested in, please don't worry. I'm not cutting 500 words out of the second half of the story to hit my mark and the absolute MINIMUM length of the story from that point on would be 4100. That second half is probably going to take 2000 words anyway, and in fact there's a very good chance that it'll take as much as 2800.
Thank you.
