I knew partway through the first draft of Thoughtless that I was going to want it to be around 100,000 words. My first draft was written by hand in a series of notebooks. While writing Yellow Tape and Coffee, I just picked up whatever notebooks I could find for cheap, usually between $.50 and $1.00 each. Which is why I ended up with so many different sizes and kinds:
When I was writing Thoughtless, though, I splurged a bit and bought the same style of notebooks: 5″x7″ 100 pages, college ruled. Aside from being a good comfortable size to carry around, the standard size helped in estimating word count as I went. I counted the words on several pages, and they barely varied at all: 89-91 words per page. Which meant there were about 9000 words per notebook. So, if I filled ten of them, I’d be at around 90,000 words. Since I tend to expand when I edit, at least to begin with, that would be a good number. I ended up filling nine of them by the time I’d reached the end of the story:
While typing them in, from the notebooks into the computer, I do a lot of editing. Some scenes I expand, some I change around, or cut out entirely. Sometimes I rearrange things. Once everything’s in, that’s when I go through and edit. So this, the third draft, is the one that eventually goes out to my beta readers, and I do some major editing after that. Because I do this third edit chapter by chapter, and release it to my beta readers at the same time, by the time I’ve reached the end, I’ve already received a lot of feedback and can jump right back in to the fourth draft. The fifth is mostly just polishing after that, and possibly considering any feedback that comes in afterward. This is the draft that goes to my editor.
As you can see from the spreadsheet, the word count remains mostly stable after the first couple of drafts. That doesn’t mean that not much has changed, though. For example, I deleted about half of chapter 14 between the third and fourth drafts, and replaced it with a completely different scene, which required changing a paragraph or two to set it up/deal with its implications in almost every other chapter throughout the novel. But all this added material just happened to be around the same as the deleted material from other edits. Which worked out well, because it meant the completed novel landed at almost exactly 100,000 words, which is what I was originally aiming for.