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

[msagara.livejournal.com]

Go to the options tab in there and make sure the lines per page is at 25. Give it a second to recount, and that will give you how many SMF pages on the printed pages line. 400 will be where you aim.

Actually, the default setting of 54 lines per page with 12 pt. courier counts SMF pages (the count will be low because it doesn't seem to pick up the page-break at end of chapter). Or rather, it counts the 24 pt SMF page. (I tried it with 25, and with 54, and exported to SMF; the 54 came within 2 pages of the exported manuscript).

Thank you very much for this!

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

Glad it worked! Scrivener is such a useful tool, but it does take some fiddling with to learn how to use it. I don't use near all the features it offers, but I like knowing they're there.

'Sides, it's cheaper than Word, and doesn't crash. :)