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

[camille-is-here.livejournal.com]

I use MS Word for Mac, 12 pt. Times Roman, in manuscript format which usually turns out to be roughly a page in paperback. I use the running wordcount at the bottom of the page.

I don't know what a runoff is, and I have no idea if I'm off on the word count or not, but I don't think I'm off by much, given the page counts. Since I'm within norms for the genres, book length has never come up as an issue.