I wrote approximately 900 words on the plane home tonight, which I just imported into Scrivener and which, apparently, pushed me over the 25,000 word mark to 25,091. I’d like to thank the pilot and co-pilot for a smooth ride, and my seatmate, who moved into another row even before the plane took over. If this were NaNoWriMo, I’d be halfway done by now, but Meet the Larssons will clearly be more than 50,000 words. I’m using 100,000 as my word count goal in the little progress bar widget on the sidebar, but of course I have no idea how long the thing is going to be.
I haven’t run a step in almost a week (not counting a sprint through the terminal to catch my plane tonight), and I can feel the lack of exercise. My mileage was way down last week, and is at zero for this week.
I keep tracking my word count on the book because like my weekly mileage for running, it’s the only metric I’ve got. I’m not far enough along in the storyline to be able to measure against the distance to the finish.
The Unfocused Life 
The 25k mark is awesome to reach. :)
A lot of novel-length stories are more than 50k; 50k is on the small end, maybe 200 pages, probably less than that, in paperback. Sometimes a story is just long enough for it, but often novels boil over into the 80k to 100k range.
(I know that my first one went into 80k or so. If I wasn’t on speed at the time, it would have been closer to 100k.)
Nothing wrong with keeping page count as a metric! But you’ll know when to finish when the story is done.
Congrats on the 25K words.
As for Scrivener, I checked that out and it only works on a Mac. And it seems to be the best novel writing software I have seen so far.
If anyone comes across anything decent for Windows, let me know.
For Windows software, I’ve heard good things about Rough Draft. I’ve never seen it myself, but based on descriptions from other people, it sounds similar to Scrivener.
I use Jer’s Novel Writer myself. Also only for Macs.
Right now I’m using yWriter. I’ve finally learned enough about writing to appreciate what it offers, Plus it’s free.
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