A quick question for writers

[msagara]

I mentioned earlier that I have been using the equivalent of MS Word's wordcount while writing, and that this has not perhaps been very smart. I know that we're all looking at the lengths of our various books, and I was wondering: How do you keep track of wordcount while writing? Because I had an extra 45K words and an extra 25K words when looking at the page runoffs on the two books I did write in Scrivener, and this was ... unfortunate. And I would like not to repeat it if I can*.

If you need to turn in a 100k manuscript--or a manuscript of a specific maximum length--do you check the runoff count as part of your daily writing, do you format it in manuscript format so you write -to- a runoff count?

ETA: * I am aware that there might be a bit of gentle mockery at this point

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I write in manuscript format, where for me 'manuscript format' is 12pt Courier set to exact 25pt spacing with .3" tabs and 1" margins all around. And then I do this slightly weird thing for wordcount: I use MS Word's wordcount for my goal for the length of the book, so if it's 110K, I want MSW to say 110K. That's slightly longer than 440 pages, though, and almost all the time the result is that I actually come in just about dead on the page count expected. I don't think I've ever had a book come out more than 5K more or less than anticipated. Certainly not more than 10K.

No idea if that's helpful, but that's what I do. :)