50,000 and Beyond

I probably was supposed to write about the novel last week but more than likely I forgot or I didn't feel like it. I made it 50,000 words one week before the end of November then I marched right on over and validated the novel. But it is not done and the week between getting that word goal and now well that is a different story. I totally slacked on writing. The novel is not done but it is close at 60,000 words. Then  I went to ultimate panic mood which was not necessary, the going rate for a novel is MORE than 75,000 words. I am aiming for 65,000 because I don't think the novel needs to be boring just to fill in words. Then I did a little bit of searching...

Stephen King's first novel Carrie had around 62,000 words. This novel is special because it was rejected so many times and finally someone had the belief in this book and look at him now. The Old Man and the Sea  was really short with coming in less than 30,000 words. Of Mice and Men and The Great Gatsby were all short books coming in with word counts less than 75,000. You can look all this up on the web, sites like goodreads.com and amazon.com have information on word counts. So my blood pressure went down, some that is. I am a crux now in the writing, I am so close to finish and I want to finish but the scene I am working on his holding me up. Oh yes, I know that is an excuse and that is probably why I am writing on here right instead of finishing the novel.

Of course, if a book is a good it doesn't matter what the word count is. Speaking of word count, I always hated word counts and many times when I had to write literary essays, my teacher was a stickler for word count and didn't matter if the essay was good with a short word count she want shit filler. For a long time, I wrote what I wanted to and when the story was done it was done. I have written very short stories to novellas in my time. Of course, the anti-word count sentiment does tend to be troublesome when it comes to finding publishers because publishers have adhere to word count because of space issues. Okay that was off topic...

The title of the novel I am writing is Moonswallow Gates which is the name of the house in the book. I wasn't going to use that name as the title but oddly enough there were no other titles worthy. So my main goal now is to finish the book. Then edit the book somewhere in there I should start looking for a publisher because I don't want this to die, this book just might change my life. This might be the book that allows me to stay at home and keep writing without working in the real world. This is my book and I think it is awesome.