For the better part of a quarter century I used IBM’s ‘Lotus Word Pro’ as my word processor.  I still would if they hadn’t discontinued it.  I found it so easy to use and it just did as it was told, whereas ‘Word’ always seemed to have strange bits of automation that I had to hunt out to switch off.  Now though, ‘Word’ is pretty much what there is, so that’s what I use.

So why am I telling you all this tedium?  Basically because ‘Word’ has got me half obsessed with the length of my books.  In ‘Word-Pro’, you could get a word count, but you had to ask for it and it was a menu inside a menu.  As a result I very rarely did ask, and frankly I wasn’t much interested.  I knew how many pages long a book was and that was good enough for me.  But now the version of ‘Word’ I use has a word count permanently on in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.  And so I know, for example, that ‘Wyeburn Station’, the book I’m writing at the moment, is currently 72,275 words long.  Does it matter?  Not in the slightest.

Some authors tell me that they aim for all their books to be at or close to a particular length.  Those that still publish on paper might like them to form a nice neat uniform set on a shelf.  I’m afraid I don’t.  The book will be as long as the story takes to tell.  I try not to waste words: that gets boring.  And as I hone a book from first draft, through several stages to a publication draft, I try to be ruthless in hunting down duplications or superfluous wordage.  But I certainly don’t cut the story itself as if it was a film I had to make fit a particular length.

I’m told that the average romance is around sixty to sixty-five thousand words.  Mine are always a good bit longer than that.  Well, I like to give value for money and besides, my books are more than just romances because they also try to address serious issues.  But my longest book, ‘Martine’ is almost twice as long as my shortest, ‘Red’ at 161,000 and 83,000 words respectively.

So how long is a book?  As long as it needs to be, but hopefully no longer.