The Hunted Angel is developing. According to Microsoft’s ubiquitous word processor, Word, the overall word count currently stands at 58,381 words. It will be higher later today, of course, and may pass the 60,000-word barrier tomorrow.
How accurate that figure may be is anybody’s guess. I once ran the text of a book I had written through Word and a rival word processor, called Libre Office Writer, and compared their word counts. Both came up with different totals – and the difference was to the order of several thousand. To this day, I have no idea which was the more accurate. It may be that one counts the headers while the other doesn’t, or it could be something else altogether.
For that reason, I prefer to think in terms of pages, rather than words. Word’s default layout is A4 everywhere except the USA (which uses the slightly squarer US Standard Letter as its default). I simply set a margin of one inch (2.54cm) on all four sides and a first line indent of 0.4cm on all paragraphs except the first, which is flush aligned to the left margin. That is industry standard practice. Unlike many independent writers, I also follow standard practice by double-spacing my text. This has benefits when it comes to editing, but that is worthy of a post on its own, so I won’t go into details here. One of the results of this procedure is that the number of pages in the Master Copy ends up similar to the number of pages in the print edition of the book.
Currently, the book stands at 201 pages, which means that it is about half done. I know how the story will end (not that I have any intention of giving that away to you). The question is how to get from where it is at the moment to where it will be at the conclusion. It will take time to sort that out, but I will get there.
It won’t be finished this year, but I have set a target of early next year. February, in all probability.
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