Depends entirely on the market, the genre and the writer.

I guess I should have been more specific. I was thinking of 250 pages as "decent." So, 70-80K sounds about right.

The thicker a book, the higher the cost of producing it and the higher the retail price on the book. My Word program, which defaults to novel submission formatting, averages 235 words per manuscript page; of course, I tend to use a lot of longish words. Call it a flat 250, and you get just about a 300-page manuscript - not the final printed book, the manuscript - at between 70K and 75K.

I'm still coming down, here. I think maybe this particular book has wanted out for, oh, 28 years or so. Right now, I'm fucking stoned on it.

It's only rock and rolllllllllllllllllll...

Damn...

I think if it's much shorter than 40 or 50K, they call it a novella instead. There's no upper limit as long as someone is willing to publish it, but I think those impressively long fantasy sagas come in around 200 to 250K. I'm shooting for 100K, mostly because it's a fairly typical length for a single title historical romance, and if I didn't limit myself I'd never shut up. I seem to have a limitless capacity for subplots and detailed backstories for secondary characters, major and minor. One of these days Ima write a fantasy saga just so I can let it all hang out for a change.

I don't think I've got a novel in me. I've got words that want out, but I'm finding the drabbles and an occassional poem seem to be pretty much enough to satisfy my muse. Could be, too, there's just nothing that has really grabbed my muse and shook her up and said "fucking write something, bitch!" It could be there, just hasn't surfaced yet.

I sometimes wish I had something shorter than 100K in me, just to make the gratification a little less delayed.

Heh. I think that's my muse's problem, Susan; she's very much Id driven. She wants results and she wants them, NOW. If I can ever convince her to just hang in there and wait, it will all be worth it, I might actually get something novel length out.

I have a question for all. What do you do when what you're writing puts you in a bad place, dredges up hard memories, and you have to put those hard memories to paper, and it's painful?

I can't get the cloud to stop following me around, like that egg in the Zoloft commericial. I'm alternately angry, embarassed, and sad thinking about some of the harder lessons in fandom. I feel like I'm drowning in insanity that I had filed away in a junk drawer years ago, and I'm moving out of the house that fandom built, and I have to organize that shit in that overstuffed drawer with the broken hinges, and finding pictures of people who hurt me, finding crazy notes I wrote to crazy people, and so on.

And I want to stuff it all in the trash and incinerate, but I know there's a section in there that needs to be written, and I've put it off for a long time.

I just am having such a hard time admitting it all.

Hell, I could care less about the length. This just wants out.

Oh, man, does it want out...

I just am having such a hard time admitting it all.

That's what I'm writing at the moment. Every fucking WORD is like being stoned, and I don't mean pass the pipe stoned, I mean Shirley jackson "The Lottery" stoned: jagged little rocks, thousands of them. I've been alternately shaking and exalted since I started letting this thing out. It hurts like blue fuck.

Only two ways I can cope, for what it's worth: I let myself understand that the pain is good stuff, in the sense of lancing an infection. Hurts sometimes beyond bearing, but it's letting some of the hideous pus out of the wound, in this case, an old, old one with a lot of scar tissue and proudflesh built up over it.

And the other thing, quite brutally and simply? I ask myself whether the fact that it hurts is going to produce the honesty that produces better work. If the answer is yes, I suck it up and bleed internally, if that's what it takes.