I’ve just passed 100,000 words on the first draft of Fuller’s Mine. I’m guessing that by the time I finish the story and then edit, the final length will be about that. For comparison, Newton’s Ark is 76,000 words.

One of the questions I asked when I set out to write my first novel, was how how many words are required to be considered a novel?

I soon discovered there’s no hard and fast answer, but 70,000 – 100,000 words is considered typical, to the extent there can be any such thing as typical when there are famous novels of less than 50,000 words (e.g. Fahrenheit 451) and more than 500,000 words (e.g. War and Peace).

The right answer of course is it needs to be as long as it needs to be and no longer.