Statistics on the novel
These charts are to amuse me and mark the time.
Five Strange Languages: growth of the project | ||||||
2015 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2023 | 2024 | |
Number of books | 1 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 |
Number of words | 356,700 | 412,700 | 517,500 | 412,700 | 580,000 | 603,600 |
No. of illustrations | 516 | c. 400 | c. 400 | c. 400 | c. 400 | 645 |
Sheet music pages | 0 | c. 30 | c. 30 | c. 100 | c. 100 | c. 150 |
Hours of writing | 2,500 | 4,500 | 5,200 | 8,500 | 11,340 | c. 15,000 |
Number of fires | 14 | 9 | 9 | 9 | c. 30 | c. 30 |
It looks like the entire novel will find its shape at around 600,000 words and 2,000 pages. That’s more or less the limit of literary publishing: Infinite Jest is 550,000 words; War and Peace is 570,000 words. The problem is those books don’t have illustrations, and images swell the page count. Few single-volume novels are published over 1,200 pages: Wallace’s is 1,100; Vollmann’s Imperial and Dying Grass are about 1,300.
For that reason, starting around 2015 I decided to divide the project into independent books, first three, then four, and finally, in December 2022, five.
Book 1 A Picture of the Sky, With Nothing in It
Book 2 A Short Introduction to Anneliese
Book 3 Weak in Comparison to Dreams
Book 4 Ghosts Are
Book 5 An Inventory of the Dead
Five Strange Languages: word and image counts | ||||||
Book 1 | Book 2 | Book 3 | Book 4 | Book 5 | ||
Stories, Like Illnesses | A Short Introduction to Anneliese | Weak in Comparison to Dreams | Ghosts Are | An Inventory of the Dead | Totals | |
Words | 151,700 | 199,200 | 129,600 | 55,400 | 12,400 | 603,600 |
Images | 150 | 86 | 297 | 110 | 0 | 645 |
Pages in MS | 602 | 543 | 567 | 232 | 37 | 1,981 |
Pages in print | 607 | |||||
Medium | InDesign | Google doc | (print) | Word | Word | |
(Both these tables are approximate. They are kept updated on the Spreadsheet.)