I wish it were longer. But for now, it is what it is. There’s still a whole lot of massaging to be done, and it will probably have to go through many hands before it is fit for public consumption. Plus I still have got 2 more chapters to write, so that should stretch it even longer.

I’ve often stumbled when asked how many pages I’ve written for my novel. It’s a pretty tricky one to answer because I’m sure the enquiry was for what page my book would be at were  it in paperback today, and not the page count that Microsoft Word gives me, which would be based on an A4 size page with 1 inch margins and an 11 pt Calibri font.

So I often reply that question by telling them the amount of words I’ve written (at this writing I’m at 37,120 words). Unfortunately, the follow up question to that has always been, “So how many pages is that?”

As frustrated as I sometimes get when asked that question, I’ve always been curious myself of the answer, just so I have some indication of how much further I have to go. So I googled it to see if they had some kind of words-to-paperback page calculator
I wasn’t able to find my answer, but I ran into something else that has helped relieve my anxiety a little.

This is from the 2008 “Guide to Literary Agents”:

Up to 1000 words= short story/ flash fiction
1000-6000 words= short story
6000-15000 words= long story/ novelette
15000-45000 words= novella
45000-120000= novel (commonly between 50000 and 80000)

So guess what? Another 8000 words and I would have written myself a novel. Yee Haa! Now, if I only knew how many pages 8000 words was.