Autumn is the ideal time for writers. At least in the opinion of this struggling author. The mood is just right for inspiration. Even the mention of Halloween brings delightfully creepy images to mind, and other doleful delicacies.
This September, however, finds me in a tangle of non-fiction. Hoping against hope to divine the correct alchemy to get creative writing published, I’ve been putting efforts toward my non-fiction tome. It’s not a fall book. It’s a quotidian book.
Like all my work, it is built from scratch. Watching the word count at the bottom of the page is like trying to watch and hour hand move on a clock with continuous motion. I feel like I’ve said so much already, but the industry standard “book length” hasn’t yet been reached.
Meanwhile, I’m itching, aching even, to write my usual gloomy autumnal fiction.
How long is a book supposed to be? There’s no right answer to that, of course. A few years ago there was a book published called something like Million. It was simply a million dots spread across so many pages, to show the “reader” what a million really was. I’ve read books for adults with less that 40,000 words. A “book,” using offset printing, can be as few as 16, or perhaps even 8, pages.
In the days before industrial printing, book length was a matter of content. When you were done saying what you had to say, the book was finished. Now, in the day of big publishing, the internet, agents, and excess of content, the publisher calls the shots.
Even so, trying to get a straight answer on word count is difficult. Just the other day I googled word counts and read that 70,000 is the bare minimum for a novel. Another website said 40,000. They agree that anything over 100,000 will make a publisher cringe. My second complete novel was 232,000 words. No wonder it sank like a cinderblock tied to an author’s ankle.
These days my work demands most all of my time. My few minutes of writing each day lead to paltry word counts. Slowly, ever so slowly, the non-fiction tome grows. I hope I get it published. I hope it will make people wonder who K. Marvin Bruce is. Maybe then they’ll want to read my fiction.
Autumn is fast approaching. And fiction is, I truly feel, what I do best.
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