1 | Cathy C. Hall Writes

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, then you’ve already seen the picture of this totally awesome mousepad:

Does it remind you of something? Something you played with for hours as a kid? Hint: You can write on the mousepad, then with a flick of your wrist, the message disappears.

The Magic Slate, right? You can write little notes to yourself while you’re working on your laptop, and then when you don’t need the note anymore, you just lift the magic page and it’s clean again. It’s perfect for those times when I’m editing a long manuscript. I’ll jot down the page I’m working on for quick reference when I return to it. And often, I’ll be working from several versions of the same manuscript so I’ll have several page numbers on the pad.

Now, honestly, I don’t know if I would’ve bought this mousepad for myself. It’s handy as heck, but not necessarily…necessary. But Youngest Junior Hall found it on a website called Quirky, knew I’d like it, and voila! The Scratch-n-Roll arrived at my house.

I think I may have mentioned Quirky before–it’s a website for inventors to get their products out there to the masses. Of course, there’s more to it than simply inventing–and if you know anything about inventing, you know that’s a tough row to hoe, anyway–but Quirky is one way to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams.

Which brings me to the second reason this mousepad was totally awesome. Youngest Junior Hall (the business major) learned about Quirky in his entrepreneur class. So when he called to tell me my gift was on the way, he wanted me to know that he’d found it on this website called Quirky. “You’ve probably never heard of it,” he said, implying that his mother is of that generation mere days away from being put out to pasture.

But I said, “Oh, yes, I know Quirky. I’m signed up over there. I get the Quirky updates every week.”

I cannot lie. There was a moment, a paradigm shift, if you will, while Youngest Junior Hall considered that his mother was already signed up at a website he’d just learned about in his la-ti-da business college class.

Totally awesome, right?

A couple days ago, I wrote a post for The Muffin for all those writers who’re engaged in November’s writing challenges. Mostly, I wanted to emphasize one point. To wit, if you’re going to put in the effort for a writing challenge, make those word counts count.

And that got me thinking about word counts and my own efforts. After a day at the Rutger’s One-Plus-One Conference, I knew I wanted to add a bit more of a spiritual element in my Young Adult novel, but even with those added words, I wondered if my YA novel’s length would fall within the publishing industry’s standards for contemporary YA.

To be honest, I’m a bare bones writer. I tend to throw out the descriptive stuff and get right to the action. Probably because when I read, I skip those long, descriptive passages. Unless, of course, the prose is so lyrical, so evocative, that I can’t help but read it. Truly, I don’t come across that kind of writing that often–and I’m nowhere near that level of skill in my own prose. So I just zip through with my dialogue and hope that no one notices. I wouldn’t notice myself, except that when I come to the end of my books or stories, I almost always think, hmmmm. That seemed a lot longer when I was writing it.

Anyway, I needed to check word counts for books. Maybe you do, too. You can read the Guide to Literary Agents’ post on the subject, or you can check out Literary Rambles, where Casey McCormick gives a fairly in-depth look at word counts for children’s books, and provides a handful of related sites for further research. And you can always go to Renaissance Learning and find the exact word count of a book (and other useful info) as I did for The Princess Bride.

And finally, I’ll leave you with this question to ponder: Have you ever noticed how, no matter what you’re doing, math finds a way to stick its nose in your business?