One way to really freeze me in my tracks is to ask me how long my book is. What will happen is, I’ll answer honestly – Seeing by Moonlight is about 88,000 words long, give or take. And then, whomever is doing the asking will follow with: “How many pages is that?” And then, I will make a face like this:

Because it’s a digital book with no fixed page count. You could honestly read a 250-page book with that word count, or a 400-page book. My partner sent me a prospective paperback layout for it that passed 500 pages.

I understand the breakdown in the conversational schematic, honestly. I learned my craft at the student newspaper, where, once I knew what I was writing about, the very next question had to be “how long?” You can cheat pages – font size, line spacing, chapter endings, so on and so forth. Page count is an illusion. Words, though, words are a fixed unit of measure. That appeals to me, and seems like a more and more sensible system as digital publishing grows – alas the world does not adopt it. So the people asking me, who are usually not aware that page count is an illusion, are just trying to move it to their frame of reference.

At that point I try really awkwardly to say that a lot of mass-market thrillers will land in the vicinity of 100,000 words, that genre pulp can be shorter, while doorstop authors can easily deliver 2-300,000 words in a single tome; but by then I’m really just going blah-blah-blah and taking the conversation into a ditch.

The truth is, you have a lot of liberty with length and formatting in books; even moreso now that you can publish just by filling out a form on Amazon and e-mailing a document. There are smutty quickies that are all of 11 pages long selling for 99-cents, and the market will bear that price.

We’re in the home stretch of A Sickness in Time. That first draft is going to be about 84-85,000 words, I think. When I publish Stages of Sleep, that’s going to be about 58,000 words’ worth of short-to-longish stories, ranging from about 800 words to over 12,000. I have written micro-stories, flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, and co-authored these legit-lengthed “novels”; and those words must come across as distinctions without differences to you, especially given what I just argued about the freedom of digital publishing.

I admit, though, that for my own work, I don’t think I want go down the road of publishing things that are shorter than books. First – it costs money to do it how I do it, with professional editing and artwork, and I save on that investment by waiting until I have a book’s worth of material, even if it’s collected stories. And second, I want, for the moment, to have each “thing” that comes out feel really substantial. I know there are non-smutty digital authors who release 99-cent “story packs” of two or three stories; and maybe later I’ll do that, but I’m on my own timetable right now and it just doesn’t feel like the move, given nobody knows who the hell I am.

There’s a piece I started on earlier this year that I’ve dusted off in recent days. It’s a comedic sci-fi story, and when I first pinged my internal radar for a length estimate I came back with about 6,000 words. That’s hefty for a short story, and would limit the number of magazines I could submit it to, but I didn’t want to rush. Besides, my first impression was that I really liked the main character and tone; and if the thing clicked I thought I might be able to publish a loosely-connected series of stories for the same character.

As I’m scratching my way into it though, I’m enjoying this scenario far more than my initial guess. At this point, the projected length has easily doubled. 12,000 is a novelette, not something I could publish on its own under my strategy right now, but here’s the thing – I am starting to see it as possible that this could go well beyond that. Suddenly I was asking the question is this a book? Now that I’ve written one of those and have damn near written another, I must admit it’s a less-frightening question to ask.

Still, I couldn’t force this up to 80K words; or even 60K. My gut tells me that at that point it won’t be funny anymore. These things can be very gut-guided. So, I did what I often do at this point – which I wholly admit makes me probably super-weird even among authors: I looked for length precedent.

If you’re dealing with comedy sci-fi, my Bible is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There aren’t many books that influenced me more. So I found the book on the web in .txt format, pasted it into Word, and let the Word Count feature do its thing.

47,000 words, give or take. I remember reading it at a single sitting once. Very brisk, for a book, but obviously more than acceptable as a length for a book. Given the digital age, I could probably even go a bit shorter.

That’s comforting. Clearly there are questions beyond the number, and quantity is never going to equal quality if I’m standing next to Douglas Adams. But really, it’s comforting. I know, mathematically, the gap from 12,000 words to 47,000 words is large; and it will be a hell of a lot of work to type those extra words. But in terms of imagining the story, it’s really only a step as long as this: think of it as a book instead. Everything flows from that framing.

Maybe it will turn out it’s not a book. That would be okay; I’ll make it as good as I know how and then figure out how it will get published. I only write this because I don’t think authors always like to admit that inspiration and process are not all about getting handsy with the Muse through her diaphanous night-clothes and all that. These things are important.

The Count
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