Well, that’s it away now: synopsis is done (always a pain in the bum – and I can’t abide doing those detailed, blow-by-blow jobs, so I’m aiming for the marketing blurb on the back of the book style things) and the whole lot will be sitting in Phil’s inbox by the time he clambers into the office on Monday morning.
I’m one of these people who saves all their chapters as individual files. Don’t ask me why, I just don’t like working with the whole thing as one huge document. I find it a lot more cumbersome that keeping everything nice and partitioned. Phil, and HC however, hate this. They like it all to be one big file, so I have to spend ages cutting the thing together before I send it off. Another pain in the bum, but gosh-darn-it if these guys and galls ain’t worth it. So I had an IT geek moment this morning and built a word macro that would loop over how ever many chapters you stuck into the input box and build the whole thing automatically from all the little chapters. And considering there’s 45 of the wee buggers, you can see why I wanted something to do it automatically for me.
One thing you don’t get when you do everything as individual chapters is a complete and accurate word count. Yea, you can keep a note of the word count in each of the separate files, but as I pop back and forth, checking some things, changing others, my numbers soon start going adrift. So it wasn't until I ran my geek-fest macro that I actually knew how big the thing was.
150,359 words.
Holly shit. That’s HUGE! That’s bigger than an elephant! TWO ELEPHANTS! Even going along with Stephen King’s formula (second draft = first draft less 10%) that’s still going to be over 135K. Then again my contract with HC wants 150,000, so you could say I’ve done not too bad. Just 359 words to get rid of and it's done ;}#
Now just have to hope Phil doesn’t come back with startled screams of “Oh my God, we’re all ruined!”