Monday, July 22, 2002
No rain again today. Just clouds that swept past the city with no intent of cooling anything off, teasing with a little thunder and a few glimmers of heat lightning.
But it was a productive (and exhausting) workday. First a bazillion e-mails (How many zeros is in one bazillion?), then I did 1,017 wds. on Chapter Eleven of Low Red Moon. Afterwards, I did another 1,039 wds. on "The Drowned Geologist." So, I earned my milk and cookies for the day. And on this subject of my obsessive accounting of numbers of words per day, an e-mail from Maureen:
The word count seems a common thread but what did you do
before there were word processors that counted them for you? Did you
go by pages back in the dark days of the typewriter? I remember our
tech writers wrote to a template and page count but it seems odd for
me to think of fiction in terms of limits like that. I guess I've the
idealized notion that the book will fit the story rather than having
the story try and fit the book. From reading your journal I get the
feeling that there are guidelines even for fiction? Next thing you
know someone will tell me the Great Pumpkin isn't real. Does tossing
numbers around keep the editors from freaking out? If so, too bad
there's not a similar count for artists to give them a progress
report. If graphic artists measured workloads like writers do, we'd
have to offer up milestones like "I pushed 4,342,024 pixels today for
that Photoshop collage". Hmmm....... wonder if Adobe could put that
feature in there for Photoshop 8?
In the old days before word processors . . . Lord, I barely remember that far back. I had an old Royal that my mother had used once upon a time. It must have weighed about 25 pounds and most of the vowel keys either stuck or punched holes in the paper. I hauled that hunk of metal from one apartment to another. I didn't count words. I only counted pages. But there were never very many of those to count, as I was always too busy rewriting yesterday's words to get around to anything new. Then I met my first Mac and it was something akin to love at first sight. And since then, I have counted words, and paragraphs, and lines, and letters, obsessively. There's some magic in arriving at such precise numbers in mere seconds, merely by clicking the mouse. I don't think I will ever get over it.
I'm the tortoise that needs the carrot on a string if I'm ever to get anywhere at all. And counting numbers is one of my carrots.
As for required word counts, or rather, word limits, yes, they do exist. Not really for novels, except that editors seem to think longer is better, and my novels are fairly short by today's dark fantasy standards, I think. But for short stories, yes, an editor genuinely says something like, "3,000 to 10,000 words. Please contact me if you have something in mind which will run longer or shorter."
Tomorrow I go to Atlanta, and try hard not to think about any sort of numbers.
Anything else of note today? I took a bath. I read a good deal of an article on Jurassic lizards from India (in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology) and a bit of Peter Wellnhofer's The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Prehistoric Flying Reptiles. Later, I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's. There was beef and broccoli for lunch, but I only seemed interested in the broccoli. Not bad for a Sunday.
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