Managed to break free from yesterday’s craziness and finally finish Chapter 2 for the Boob Book. Not gonna rehearse today’s little triumph because it’s described in detail over here.
More of interest to the writerly set: The word count for the introduction, two chapters, and two appendices is right at 10,600.
The chapters plus the intro average 2800 words apiece. The appendices (all two of them): 1090 words each.
So, if those numbers stay consistent throughout, the 11 chapters and 5 appendices should add up to a total word count of just under 40,000 words.
That’s not very long; one would like to be closer to 80,000, for a book-length work. However, there’s a glossary — heaven only knows how long that will run. I found a large cache of definitions at a government site; ergo in the public domain. I’ll probably use most or all of those, which will inflate the word count significantly. And as we speak, I have 21 pages of references, single-spaced, set up in Chicago style. That stands at 4874 words just now.
So the references alone push the word count to around 45,000 words. If the glossary comes in at around 3,000 words (???), that would make it 48,000. Add an index, maybe another thousand words (counting numbers as words…). Hm.
Well, they say shorter is better these days, moderns not being much on reading. We shall see.
Spent this afternoon studying and outlining downloads from Kindle Unlimited, by way of building the new racy-novel enterprise.
My goodness, there’s some bad writing out there! These things are awful. Full of dangling modifiers (some of them truly hilarious), typos, unidiomatic language (“grinded”; “withering” for “writhing”; and on and on), lapses in point of view, characters dissolving pointlessly in laughter, eye-glazing clichés…
Oh, well. Clearly literature is not what people are buying the things for. 😀
A few of them do display fairly workmanlike writing, and some are even done with style and humor. But even those self-consciously deploy tried-and-true tropes. There’s quite a sameness to these things, especially where the female characters are concerned:
The female character almost invariably is said to be lonely: either she describes herself as lonely, explicitly, or some other character observes or speculates that she’s lonely.
As the story unwinds, the woman is “rescued” in some way from an unhappy relationship with a former husband/boyfriend. Male lover(s) sex is better, kinder, hotter, more positive all the way around.
Female character yearns for change or sometimes simply for an outrageous spree.
She often is described as feeling self-conscious or insecure about herself.
Attraction is immediate, as you’d expect in such short pieces – the characters lust after each other at first glance.
Men are described as “gods”
Men are often described as cooking or doing some other domestic activity; this seems to be part of his appeal or at least a repeating trope.
Hm. We’ll redact some of these other observations, lest the young, the impressionable, or the tender be reading. Suffice it to say that all the way across the board, a kind of monotony reigns.
It explains why some very, very silly things rise to the top in this genre. Like the series about the woman who gets it on with Bigfoot.
Heee! Yes. That one is said to be authored by a SAHM who home-schools the kiddies.
And that factoid also explains something. I suppose.
This is the fourth and last — and maybe the strangest — suggestion in a series of suggestions for dealing with writer’s block.