April 25th, 2008 
fanaticalpupil The Friday Five is something that started as the Friday Fifteen over on my other blog. I just happened to have five things today that I feel are worth posting.
1. Mark Terry talks about Book Advances, which basically says what John Scalzi had already told me (and many others) via his blog: Writers (fiction writers) don’t make Money (with a capital M) unless they get lucky. And I’ve already accepted that fact. But I do find that it’s nice to occasionally check in with Reality.
2. I signed up for Holly Lisle’s email newsletter.
3. Jeff VanDermeer recommends The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter. I actually already had it on my Amazon Wishlist, but I went ahead and changed the priority to Highest. For $9.60 I should probably just order it, but I’m going to see if I can get my next Amazon gift card from MyPoints before I do that.
4. Interesting article about Word Counts. Interesting as in: I’ve got 12,443 words for Hear the Grass Grow according to OpenOffice, but using “manuscript” counting as follows…
1. Count the number of characters in an average, mid-paragraph line (BTW, this all assumes a monospaced font. If you’re using a proportional font, the number of characters can vary immensely, throwing off the numbers and word count).
2. Divide by six. This is the number of words per line.
3. Count the number of lines on a page. (This includes any # for blank lines.)
4. Multiply #2 by #3 to get the number of words per page.
5. Multiply by the number of full pages (plus any fractional pages), to get the total number of words.
6. Round the number to the nearest hundred. Authors tend to round up; editors round down. This is the number you put on the front page of the manuscript.
I’ve got 21,000 words. There’s a lot of white space in the manuscript.
5. Lynn Viehl has a new Novel Crash Test Dummies writing manual. While Lynn writes what I believe are mostly paranormal romance books, she has published 38 books in the past 8 years, so she’s definitely doing something right. Most of her advice seems like it can be applied to writing in general, and the innuendo keeps things interesting.
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