The case of the ever-growing word count.

Seems like an age since I first announced I was breaking The Rogue King into four books. Looking back on my blog, it was somewhere in April, making it not even a year since the decision. Is that a long time? I guess. Maybe. Not when I factor in the previous sixteen years before then.

I look back on that post and note (with a bit of a wry smile, I’ll admit) that I’d no idea if I would ever manage to get my poor books up to a nice size of 60,000 words each. At the time, they averaged 51k. Then I went through and bumped the first one up to 61k with the addition of a few chapters.

Now, on the story page is a cumulative count of all four books. It sits at a comfy 253k. I list the word counts for each book over on the saga page.
So you don’t have to do any jumping around, it goes a little something like this…

That one I got to 61,000 words? Yeah … it’s a definite 65,500 now. All edited and ready for it’s April release (of the ebook, anyway).
The next one? It skipped over 66,000 like nobody’s business. I’m willing to bet it’ll easily reach 67k once the editing is all over with.
Of the third? Well, it seems to have stabilized at 62,000 words.
The final one is still popping and banging all over the place. It’s currently at 59,000 words. A month ago, it was at 57k.

And I’m working on little else right now, every time I do, another scene for this saga rears it’s little head. It’s not fluff, but rather that stuff I left unsaid or alluded to, the stuff I thought the story could do without when I was trying to keep it one book. Thinking about it now, I don’t know what sort of crazy juice I was on.