I’m starting to ask myself if this book’s gonna be much longer than seventy thousand words. I don’t wanna pad it out. I also don’t want to starve it, either.
- 68.5K words.
- Killed off a character. Now am out of characters to casually kill off.
- Pretty much it.
Clearly, it’s time to retcon a few more characters in, so you can kill some more off. 🙂
I recall that 60k is considered the lower threshold for “novel”, but please don’t try to constrain yourself artificially by word count. Word count is about as valuable of a metric for prose as lines-of-code is for software engineering – it’s something management (or publishers) like to measure, but it doesn’t tell you anything about quality.
At least, that’s my $0.02
If you need extra pages, there’s always room for more maps! 😉
My novel is a little past 123,000 and most of my work is figuring out where to cut. It’s kind of target-rich environment for cutting.