One of the comments Chris and I got when we finished posting “Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change – Spring” was that we’d written (and posted) more than one million words.
I’m a very big fan of Eric Flint’s “1632:Ring of Fire” series of alternate history stories, tales of a town in West Virginia that gets zapped by a cosmic fluke and goes from the U.S. in the year 2000 to Germany in the year 1631. I just finished latest collection of shorter stories, Ring of Fire IV. In the preface, Eric Flint talks about the number of words in the twenty plus books and e-magazines in the series. Books are better measured by word count than by page count because font and number of words per page can influence how many pages a story takes.
The “Ring of Fire” series, in all forms – print and electronic, comes to some 9,674,000 words. (Flint rounded all the word counts to the nearest thousand.) By comparison, Flint notes, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is about 455,00 words, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a little over 587,000 words. Combined, that’s 1,042,000 words.
Below is the word count for each of the eight stories we’ve posted of the Eerie Saloon saga. I didn’t count the character list, which isn’t a story. We beat Tolkein and Tolstoy combined by 30,000 words.
I guess “saga” is the correct term for what Chris and I have written.
Eerie Saloon Stories
How It Began..........
Part 1.......... 57,861
Part 2.......... 58,326
Part 3.......... 32,322
Total........ 148,509 words
Outlaw Queen
……........... 71,403 words
Autumn
Part 1.......... 56,823
Part 2.......... 49,023
Part 3.......... 65,837
Total….....171,683 words
Toy Soldier
……............ 20,756 words
Winter
Part 1.......... 88,853
Part 2.......... 79,412
Part 3.......... 79,395
Total........ 247,660 words
Spring
Chap. 01.... 17,528
Chap. 02... 24,387
Chap. 03... 26,580
Chap. 04... 23,927
Chap. 05... 37,560
Chap. 06... 29,393
Chap. 07... 28,683
Chap. 08... 21,837
Chap. 09... 24,676
Chap. 10... 28,361
Chap. 11... 29,012
Chap. 12... 37,211
Chap. 13... 28,614
Total....... 357,769 words
Cameo Murder
Part 1.......... 28,595
Part 2.......... 25,619
Total........ 54,214 words
The Portrait
261 words
Grand Total..........1,072,255 words
And THAT is a lot of words.
Comments
Well done, a feat indeed
However, Bike rumbles on towards 4,000,000 words and this year will be ten years old.
Angharad
I guess my numbers are kind of small
Over five thousand captions in three and a half years. The average cap is over 200 words so I guess I passed the million mark myself. Small bits but they add up.
Commentator
Visit my Caption Blog: Dawn's Girly Site
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What do you read, my lord?
Words, words, words :)
Bru
Proud author of 22 327 words at this site (including possible adding errors)
Let's think...
Just a quick estimate of my own
Sisters running at about 90k
A Longer War about 90k
StD 70k
Cold Feet 130k
Ride On 160k
Riding Home 55k
Uniforms 15.5k
Cider 72k
TLTL 93k
ET 81k
Sweat and Tears 72k
Viewpoints 54k
Sundry others 39k
Around a million, then. Somewhat scary...
Trying to Recall...
...the word count on Ellen Hayes's Tuck. Somewhere just over two million, I think, after adding in either version of Season. Back around 2009, it was so far ahead of any other one-author online serial (TG or otherwise) that it wasn't close.
Eric
There's a Saying
"Words should be weighed, not counted."
I recall a comment by one of the creators of the "Quest for Glory" computer games. She wanted to end the series, to avoid having the initial installments become essentially meaningless. I suppose things might be different for a Universe, although I suspect otherwise: it's not so different.
-- Daphne Xu