50,000

My story is at 50,000 words.  I refuse to admit most of the time, even to myself, how far off my accident threw me from day-to day-writing.  If I had to confess that something in my head had changed, it would be my focus on reading and writing.  Now, it could certainly be that I'm just getting older and my brain is changing anyway.  I'd prefer to believe that.  It's a more comforting thought than that some stupid bump did something I can't introspectively diagnose.

Be that as it may, I hit 50,000 words today or 200 pages if you use the somewhat standard 250 words per page metric. Amusingly, if you count text in review notes, the thing is probably a tenth longer.  I have over 250 notes to myself in the margins.  That doesn't quite make it a novel.  64,000 is the median word count for a novel.  Brave New World falls pretty much right on that line if you're looking for a reference point.  And my goal is 64000-80000 words, so I have 56 to 120 pages left to write.  I think those 56 will come easy as I flush out my ending, and 120 might not even be that hard as I make a last loop through to clean it all up and eliminate my personal habits that creep into the text.  e.g. I tend to run on my sentences, so they need to be broken up in places.  I should watch for that and which and further and farther.  And most important, I have to trawl the text for just, even, about, as far as, no doubt, in that case, and perhaps.  Stupid meta language that weakens the story.

And then the question is what to do with it.  Self publish?  I have friends that are self published.  So that might be the way to go.  I'll leap that hurdle when I cross the 64K line.