Last year, I was asked if I wanted to write a stretch goal setting for an RPG kickstarter, and of course, I said yes. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mneme and I bounced ideas back and forth, and I got the official okay to have him be a co-author of this project.
We had three and a half months, and while, yes, we could have written faster, focused more of our time on this, we did not dawdle. As we neared the very end, we asked for and received a three day extension for what I'd estimated at 10-15K words.
We sent everything in, and after finally stitching the various pieces into one document, did a word count. I was hoping we'd be 15K or less, but knew it might be, oh, 20-25K.
It's 50K.
We wrote 50K words.
By Hugo Award definitions, 40K words = a novel. This isn't a novel, but a guide for using the core rules for a specific genre, with a sample setting. And I know how much layout can do to shrink page count.
But, this is five times my estimate of 10K, over three times my estimate of 15K, and two times my "well, it can't possibly be bigger than that" estimate.
Um. I feel less abashed at asking for a 3 day extension given just how much we churned out, but... I'm still staring at my screen in shock.
mneme, who was not at all surprised, is still giggling.
mneme and I bounced ideas back and forth, and I got the official okay to have him be a co-author of this project.We had three and a half months, and while, yes, we could have written faster, focused more of our time on this, we did not dawdle. As we neared the very end, we asked for and received a three day extension for what I'd estimated at 10-15K words.
We sent everything in, and after finally stitching the various pieces into one document, did a word count. I was hoping we'd be 15K or less, but knew it might be, oh, 20-25K.
It's 50K.
We wrote 50K words.
By Hugo Award definitions, 40K words = a novel. This isn't a novel, but a guide for using the core rules for a specific genre, with a sample setting. And I know how much layout can do to shrink page count.
But, this is five times my estimate of 10K, over three times my estimate of 15K, and two times my "well, it can't possibly be bigger than that" estimate.
Um. I feel less abashed at asking for a 3 day extension given just how much we churned out, but... I'm still staring at my screen in shock.
mneme, who was not at all surprised, is still giggling.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Okay, yes, we were before this (we had a much shorter piece published years ago in a supplement for Unknown Armies, and we've both written reviews, and I've had a couple of papers published), but this feels different.
It's closest to how it feels when we finish a larp with our co-authors, but while the amount of writing may well be the same or more and the deadline is razor sharp because we've promised it WILL run at thus and such a date, it's very much not for profit and we're usually clearer on where we're going from the get go.
(How much of what we wrote will get published is another story, of course, but we are still Authors!)