Status Report for September, 2025

[tuftears]

Another month has gone by...

I have switched from COBRA to an Anthem Blue Cross insurance policy. My insurance premiums will go up a bit monthly but thems the breaks, eh? At least the medical facilities I normally use are "in network".

I got my COVID and flu shots! Early--I normally target October--but I was concerned about the chances that they might be further restricted under the Current Administration. I did skip a day of exercise thanks to the vaccines wiping me out the following day, but that's to be expected.

I have written 38,484 words in the SF heist novel I have been working on.

I have continued to run Starforged. Players seem to be enjoying it, but once we wind up the current arc, I might suggest we take a break and catch up on things in FF14. We've been at this over half a year now, there's got to be a chunk of story we can get through now.

I finished playing Beyond Horizons - a very good science fiction game taking place on a generation ship where you are a security officer investigating crimes. Unfortunately marred by a relatively poor evidence "inventory" system but I enjoyed the story.

I also finished playing Cocoon, a puzzle game with no speech/text, just puzzle solving and trippy graphics. It was interesting, but the lack of speech or text means it's less involving, more 'hmm, wonder what that's all about.'

I am currently playing Steamworld Heist II. It's a decent tactical game.

The end is in sight for the novel I've been working on... After that, I think I'll try to finish up that illo for Archangel Beth, edit the Star Trek-like novel I finished last year, finish up the cover picture for it, release it for cheap and maybe serialize it somewhere for free. Then I'll edit the SF heist novel and release that as well.

Then I'll want to start thinking about the next book I'll be working on...

Some candidates: a sequel to the Star Trek-like novel, trying once again to make an Alien Tastes standalone novel, doing something with superheroes, doing something else entirely...

Comments

[jordangreywolf]

I hope I get to see some TuftEarsIllos at some point! :D

I have to say, I have no grasp whatsoever when it comes to visualizing word counts when it comes to novels. I've written material and then been shocked by the resulting word count. (I wrote THAT MUCH?!?) tends to be too much rambling and over-verbosity, and then trying to trim things down to "get to the point already." I suppose your manuscript is somewhere around 154 pages, roughly speaking?

Maybe I need to look up some word counts of novels that I've read to get a rough idea of what's "normal."

Let's see. Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling): 107,253 words.

Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn): 117,735 words.

It just occurs to me that the first two books to pop into my head are part of a series and not completely stand-alone novels. Hmm.

[tuftears]

I gather that mass market paperbacks have 250-350 words per page, so 180k (how many words the Rose in Nova Paree ended up) is about 600 pages! And Timecrossed Engineer would be 500 pages.

[rowyn]

The average sff novel has gotten longer over time -- in the 60s and 70s the skinnier ones were like 60k. Now the "typical" tradpub sff book is more likely to be in the 100k-120k range. The Big Fat Fantasy genre can get into the 200k+ range. If it gets too large, like 400k+, it'll run into printing problems if you want to make a physical book out of it, where printing presses may not be able to handle a book that fat and still have it be a legible font size.

[jordangreywolf]

I suppose that only makes sense. Once upon a time, novels were typed on typewriters, and typesetting was a whole lot more involved. I lived through the strange phenomenon of going from pasting up layouts with literal paste (okay, actually, beeswax) to later doing everything in "Aldus Pagemaker," and even into the early 2000s I was still occasionally doing work with copy machines and tape and at my workplace it was "revolutionary" when I started using a scanner and doing digital cleanup of hand-drawn art to incorporate into concepts, with no "correction tape" involved at all. And now I have books that I've actually paid money for (and read and used) that aren't BOOKS at all, but exist entirely on my computer (only theoretically on paper if I want to shell out the money for all that toner).

So I shouldn't be surprised if the scale creeps a bit. XD

[rowyn]

Woohoo for September progress, too!

Where are you thinking about serializing the story?

[tuftears]

I have no idea whatsoever! ^.^;; Do you have any suggestions?

[jordangreywolf]

I do wonder where one goes to find interesting short stories. There must be a bazillion communities out there SOMEWHERE, but I wouldn't have the slightest idea of where to start. It kind of reminds me of the randomness of finding out about fanzines back in the day.