Growing up, the guy who lived behind us owned an urban used car dealership. Dad bought a couple of cars from Dave, cars Dave swore were “the good ones.”  In select company Dave  explained that his specialty was moving “Hundred Thousand Mile Shooters;” cars that still had the paint, but not much engine life left.

Dad and I bought “the good ones.”

No argument. I drove the wheels off my first car, a ’79 Mercury Bobcat. Even better was the babyshit brown ’82 Grenada wagon I bought after my divorce. I had to peel the young ladies off that sexy hunka Detroit steel, lemmetellya.

There’s more to a car than mileage, but hey. Mileage matters. It does.

Word count is a funny thing. It’s a Jesus Prayer, of sorts. A consciousness of permeation. Word count is the life span of your story. After a writer has buried enough 2,000 and 4,000 word preemies that didn’t have the force-of-life to “become,” a writer is forced to understand that word count matters. It does.

Once a novel passes the 30K word mark, a writer knows he or she is negligent if they can’t finish the project.

Just last night I scrolled past a Facebook post from writer Bryan W Alaspa.

I pay attention to word count. I obsess. A little. (A lot.) Apparently I’m not the only one.

For non-writers, know that the word count for your average fictiony novel (not YA, not romance) is somewhere between 70,000 words and 100,000 words. Any word count smaller than 70 is a problem. Any word count more than 100,000 is a problem (unless it’s Fantasy or SciFi). And by “problem” I mean that there are filters in place at certain literary agencies that will automatically reject you if your number is lower than X or higher than Y. The intern won’t even forward sample pages they love if the boss has told them “Nothing over ninety-nine thousand words” and your query letter disclosure says that your story is 99,500 words.

There’s a sweet spot for word count. For my genres of writing, that sweet spot is 80,000 words. Typing “THE END” as word numbers 79,999 and 80,000 is an orgasm of perfection.

First time novelists wonder how they will ever milk enough story out of their brains to end up with 80,000 words. (Answer: More sub plots.)

Me? I’m wondering how I’m going to cram-in all the story I want to tell using fewer than 100,000 words. (Answer: Fewer sub plots.)

My agent said of Selfie, “I’ve got two criticisms. First, I wanted to see more interaction between Lacey and her little sister, Munch. Second, once we meet Lacey’s dad, he doesn’t say anything. He’s just a plot device. We don’t see much of him as a real person.”

Yes. I know. Selfie clocks in at 89,000 words. I wrote an emotional bonding scene between Lacey and Munch. I cut it for word count. I purposely didn’t expand on Lacey’s dad as a character because by the time he shows up in earnest, it’s near the end of the book and I made a decision not to ask any more of the reader in a novel that is already character-heavy. One of my “revise and resubmit” requests from an agent asked me to cut out half the characters from Selfie because she thought there were too many to follow.

I would love to accommodate you, Miss Agent. Give me permission to run up the word count and I’ll write whatever you want.

It used to be that MSWord required the user to initiate a counting program via a request from the menu bar. Now the word count is everpresent at the bottom of the screen. (287 and counting for this blog so far.) When I saw the odometer on my WiP inch north of 40,000 words, I had an “Ah!” moment. “Half way there, Shawn! Half way to another lottery ticket to the big time!”

Uh… Yeaaaaaaaah. By that time I had plotted my way out of my story and created a synopsis for what it was going to take to wrap up every sub plot that I started. I knew that I had a lot more than 40K of story left to tell.

As I sit here, the word count on my WiP is 59,397.

And I’m still miles from the conclusion of Act II. Miles. This means I’ll be shifting into Act III about the time I should be done. This is the mistake I made with A Serpent in My Father’s House. It’s an act too long.

I always plan to over write and then edit my ms back to perfection. But editing out sub plots is a bitch. It’s tough. I lose the logical transitions I crafted; those chapters that end with Character A in a pickle right before I start the next chapter with Character B in a parallel crisis. Break the chain, lose the flow. Lose the magic.

Nobody said this was easy. If I don’t get my plot under control, I’m going to end up with a Hundred Thousand Word Shooter, one that no agent wants to take for a test drive, no matter how much I try and convince her that it’s one of “the good ones.”.