Word Count and Other Odd Thoughts

I’m sitting here working on Maega (and writing a blog post, shame on me!)…

My goal is to get 1,000 words per day.  Ambitious, I’m sure, but if I have a target novel length of 70-100k, that will get me finished in 2-3 months.

Or will it?

For instance, I’m going through scene by scene right now (up to scene 8) and fleshing them out in a lot more detail.  In this post, I talked about how I wrote a narrative of the whole story, and then split the narrative into scenes.  Each scene then has probably a paragraph (4-6 sentences) of description.  This method is usually taking the scene and writing a narrative of just that scene.  Then I go back and delete the old one.

Unfortunately, that’s knocking down my word count.  I push forward 200 words, and then delete 50 of them.  That hurts.

Then to is the subject of Back Story / Setting Descriptions / Character Summaries / etc… Not to mention plotting.  The plotting I’m listing above is technically not  going into the final draft so obviously it won’t count for my overall word count… But should it count for my daily?  It took time to write them, time that hopefully is well spent as it will speed my process along.

In doing this ironing, I also wiped out an entire character.  It’s tragic, and I really don’t want to do it (He’s the former head of the exiled faction… A kindly old man that demonstrates to the reader that the exiled faction isn’t all bad).  However, he ends up adding no real content, and his scenes are somewhat boring.  I’ll keep him in the back of my mind, but for now, I think he’s gone.

Do you care about word count?  Do you think it’s a good measure?

Novel Word Count: 13,025