Sorry updates have been so scarce this month! The holiday season is always a busy time of year, but along with the usual decorating, shopping, wrapping, baking, and celebrating, I’ve been busy writing the world’s longest chapter! Well, maybe not the world’s longest, but certainly my longest chapter ever! Seriously, Chapter 51 of The World Will Know Your Name is over 10,000 words long, which is a new record for me, surpassing the previous record I set sixteen years ago with Chapter 193 of By My Side, which was over 9,000 words. (Yeah, I have a plugin that calculates this stuff for me because I am clearly a numbers nerd.)
There is no particular reason this chapter is so long. There are no sex scenes, no drawn-out and overly-dramatic resuscitation scenes, no weddings, and no funerals. It’s really just long because I self-indulgently let it be, because there was no logical place to break it up, and because I know there are many more chapters left to write in this novel and am trying to keep it under a hundred. 🙃 Consider this a month’s worth of updates all wrapped up into one!
I hit a couple of other milestones while working on this long-ass chapter. First, I finally found out exactly what Google Docs’ character limit was when it abruptly cut me off from adding anything else to my document. I’d always known there was some kind of limit that was somewhere between the length of Curtain Call and Broken because when I uploaded all my old Word documents to Google Drive years ago, I had to split Broken and everything longer than it into smaller documents. Google said the limit was 1.02 million characters, but I surpassed that number back in August without any problems. Apparently, it is actually more like 1.5 million.
It happened! 😱 I reached Google Docs’s character limit, which is not 1.02 million characters but 1,506,283 characters, apparently. pic.twitter.com/uUog8J1QEU
— Julie (@RokofAges75) December 6, 2023
The other milestone was making it to Day 700 on my writing streak yesterday! That’s seven hundred days in a row that I’ve added something to Kevin’s story, dating back to January 22, 2022 when I was still working on the first part, My Brother’s Keeper. If I can keep it going for another year, I’ll be over a thousand!
Thank you for sticking with me and continuing to read this story. Assuming the next chapter is more normal in length, I hope to be back with one more update before the year ends! Merry Christmas!🎄