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

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I don't write in manuscript format -- when word processing I use my own style sheet and reset the paragraph styles to manuscript format only when I'm ready to submit: double-spaced courier is a really poor working format for editing on-screen. But I prefer to write original copy using a text editor.

I don't (and never have) used runoff count; I go by what the word processor says the word count is (or preferably by the wc(1) algorithm if I'm working in vi).

In general, the runoff count and lexical word count of my fiction agree within a couple of percent. Which is probably a stylistic thing.