Some Arctic Raoul stats

[igenlode]

I've finished typing up to the end of Christine and Erik (as yet unedited, but word counts aren't likely to change much), which gives me twelve chapters — four short and relatively fast-moving ones on Raoul, and seven longer and slower ones on Christine... plus the one at the beginning, which is from her viewpoint too. That catches me all the way up to June 2018 ;-p

It also suggests that the total word count is going to be rather more than I'd estimated; I make the cumulative total almost exactly 44,450 so far, which is somewhat over the rule-of-thumb estimate for 85 pages at 500 words/page (42,500). Which means the entire thing is going to be even longer than I thought — fine as a fanfic serial epic, not so good as a submittable manuscript. I suspect the longeurs of Christine in captivity are likely to be a prime candidate for cutting, and likewise Raoul's drifting on board the Requin. (I saw The BBC's The Terror -- why didn't they name the ship Deimos to go with Erebus, I wonder? -- this evening, and while I'm not sure I care for it, it did remind me a lot of my researches on Arctic exploration and ice encounters.)

Word counts for each chapter so far:

Chapter 1	Moment of Parting	3004
Chapter 2	Of Love and Loss	2855
Chapter 3	A Visitor by Night	2783
Chapter 4	Aftermath	2511
Chapter 5	De Chagny Luck	3877
Chapter 6	The World Turned Upside Down	3975
Chapter 7	Flight and Arrival	5372
Chapter 8	A Wish Granted	3109
Chapter 9	The Caged Voice	4460
Chapter 10	To The End of Hope	4410
Chapter 11	Desperation	4044
Chapter 12	Wedding Morn	4095

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

Holy smoke, those chapters are huge! How do you do it?

[igenlode]

They're the same length (I think) as my chapters in any other story -- I generally aim for three to four thousand words. And those don't feel long, I hope!

A lot of them are made up of several different scenes, which is why, for example, I had to type up Chapters 7 and 8 (and I think 9) in their entirety before I could decide what was a scene boundary and what was a chapter boundary -- which is one reason why it took so long to get round to doing it, because the mental hurdle to tackling the job was that much higher.

Chapters written very slowly over a protracted period also tend to run long, simply because I have to 'write myself in' when beginning every single fresh session, which tends to lead to the creation of a random piece of word-painting/character introspection of some sort that I can never bring myself to edit out later ;-p

[betweensunandmoon]

They're the same length (I think) as my chapters in any other story -- I generally aim for three to four thousand words. And those don't feel long, I hope!

Oh, no. I guess they just sound long to me because the ideal chapter length on Wattpad is 1,000 - 2,500 words, so anything over that looks enormous by comparison. :P Of course, Wattpad stories are formatted to be read on phones, while stories on Fanfiction.net and AO3 aren't...

Have you thought of any possible titles for this epic tale yet?

[igenlode]

It does depend very much on format — I was rather horrified to discover that when I started printing it out each chapter was only four or five pages long on paper, which is obviously rather briefer than you'd normally expect to find.
Then it dawned on me that the desktop publishing program was set up to use A4 pages, whereas the average novel is narrower than A5 size (which is one reason why self-published books tend to look weird, because I think they use A5 by default, meaning that the proportions look subtly wrong). Of course the average novel is also typeset in 10pt text rather than the DTP default of 12 points, but you still get rather fewer words per page (approx 250–300 as versus 8–900).

I could sit down and create a 'novel-shaped' master page for the document and an associated body text style, but since that would just make the printout more bulky (and hence expensive to post!) I made a conscious decision not to.

I still have no real title beyond 'Arctic Raoul' (and even that gives too much away from the point of view of the is-Raoul-really-dead cliffhanger, so I've just been telling beta-readers I call it 'the Swedish story' :-p)

[watervole]

I often do chapters the same length as you - or did when I still had time/energy to write fanfic.

[igenlode]

On my very first fanfic the original chapters seem to have run about fifteen hundred words, which was too short to sit on the page of a zine, so I had to combine them :-)

Hence my longstanding habit of making up a chapter from an assortment of shorter scenes where necessary, and of aiming for a chapter length that doesn't result in multiple headings per page if appearing in print. Probably common to all zine writers :-)

[watervole]

Nope, not me. I just learnt how to tweak font sizes to make things fit, or to add pictures/poems/jokes to fill any unwanted space.

I often have multiple scenes in a chapter, but they'll be thematically linked in some way.

5000 words is not uncommon for a chapter.