It's a YA (young adult), urban fantasy (fantasy in an urban setting) novel. The word count is high and I expect to finish Forty-Two at 100,000 words. Why? because I like thick books. I've read YAs that I didn't want to end and thought could be a little meatier.
Agents might be turned off by that and that's fine, but I can't trim what I feel is necessary for the story to function as awesome. I'm of the mindset that a story takes as many words as needed to be told. One agent told me maybe I should make it more books.
Uh, no.
I don't want a series. I want a trilogy. I want it to stay that way. After I finish this trilogy, I have my mind set on a second trilogy with Jeremiah Jericho.
I don't mind books with big word counts. I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and that's 500+ thousand. (Word counts I mention are found here.) Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is 174,269 and that's one of my favorite books. As long as the words are used wisely, I don't think the word count matters.
I'm aiming for that idea with my word count. I'm not aiming for the general idea that bigger is better. I want the quantity of my words to be high quality through and through.
Forty-Two sits at a lower word count than the first book. Which is my goal.
Funny thing about Allowance, I finished it 130,000+ and after a year of edits (and that sounds long, but it's not 365 days of straight editing, it's just a time frame from when I started to when I finished...sort of) I'm down to 106,000ish. I'm very proud of losing 25,000 words. My word count goal had been about 100,000. I'm doing good. I'm proud of this accomplishment.
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