One of the things that worried me initially about this project was the page count. In the contract, there’s a sentence specifying page count. It says “The book shall be 350 to 400 published pages in length and shall include approximately 100 illustrations.” Gulp!
I remember speaking with my neighbor, a researcher with a doctorate in chemistry. I asked him how long his dissertation was, and I was quite impressed when he said it was over 300 pages. “That’s a lot!” I thought.
Well, tonight, I surprised myself. Counting all the completed (though not fully reviewed) chapters, I have written 240 pages so far. I also counted the number of figures: 202.
In a related exercise, I counted the words I had written: just under 9500! That was disappointing, to some extent. Publishers of works of fiction measure their books by words, and 9500 words is only the halfway-point to a novella. (The novel “Ulysses”, by James Joyce, is 265,000 words, and the shortest Harry Potter book, “Philosopher’s Stone”, by J.K. Rowling, is 77,000 words).
For those of reading, Thank You!
