One Million Words...

One of the things about writing that most authors tend to pay attention to is word count. Word count indicates a number of things. When it comes to fiction, the word count numbers tend to indicate what category of fiction the writing belongs to.

Micro fiction: 5 - 350 words.

Children's picture books: 400 - 800 words

Flash fiction: 500 -1,000 words

Short story: 1,500 - 5000 words

Novellas: 10,000 - 50,000 words

Middle grade fiction: 20,000 - 55,000 words

Young adult novel: 50,000 - 100,000 words

Adult novel: 50,000 - 120,000+ words

These are the common accepted ranges within the industry, whether it be traditional publishing or independent/self publishing.

The Stobrimore Chronicles books all fall firmly into the adult novel category (though they are written to be appropriate for a general audience, so you don't have to worry about content if you're looking for something for a teen reader).

Of the books written so far, the lowest word count in The Stobrimore Chronicles is book 6 (Worlds Apart) is just over 95,600 words and the highest word count is book 8 (Monsters) at roughly 118,500 words. The shortest novel, however, is not from The Stobrimore Chronicles. It's actually a science fiction novel that takes place in the same literary universe as The Stobrimore Chronicles, but is not directly related to the fantasy elements. It takes place during the events of book 7 (Invasion), but involves a group of scientists working for DARPA who have no connection to Worldgates or parallel worlds. It's called "Lightning from the Blue". That one is about 88,000 words. I'll likely publish it once I finish designing the cover and once I publish book 8 of The Stobrimore Chronicles. But that's more of a "details to come" kind of thing. The particular point in mentioning it here is because of the word count.

The reason that I'm mentioning all of these word count numbers is, as the title of this post clearly hints at, the fact that I recently reached a milestone that I never expected to reach when I first started writing "The Stobrimore Chronicles - The Beginning". And that milestone is that, along with the current word count of book 9 (Sins of the Past), which is still being written, I actually reached the one million word mark.

For most, that may not seem like that big of a deal, but as an author, it's kind of mind boggling to me. What started off as a single novel that I wrote just to see if I could do it led to more than a million words about this fictional universe populated with these characters that I created. It's kind of nuts.

But here's the thing. Even though I crossed that milestone, I still have no intention of slowing down. I'm still writing book 9 (which, given the complexity of the story so far, may potentially have to be divided into two books with a part 1 and part 2, but that's still just a possibility) and I already have some ideas for the next story in the series. I plan to keep writing until I run out of ideas, and I don't see that happening any time soon.

Perhaps I will eventually write another one of these posts if/when I hit the 2 million word mark. I suppose we'll see.