Man mario you must live in the complete opposite time zone as me.
Well since that's the case, while I would have preferred to bring this up later so as to not clog the discussion, in the interest of time there's no helping it and we'll just have to do it the hard way.
First of all, this was brought up in the entry thread:
we need a official word counting script
I propose the following site: http://www.wordcounttool.com/ just because it seems to specialize in it.
The second order of business is the word count. Since the other thread we have been bickering over it, so I propose the following solution. We use a external official and renowned writing contest/award as the source for our word count limits. This way we can rely on the experience and professional opinion, instead of guessing.
I propose the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) which have been running since 1965. SFWA members select the Nebula Award winners each year for the best short story, novelette, novella, and novel. The following is their classification for each:
Novel | a work of 40,000 words or more |
Novella | a work of at least 17,500 words but under 40,000 words |
Novelette | a work of at least 7,500 words but under 17,500 words |
Short story | a work of under 7,500 words |
It's very clear the limits are way too small even by professional standards, so instead of 1,500 it should at least be 7,500. However the question is should we allow up to Novelette status works? ie. up to 17,500 which is incidentally pretty damn close to what was requested in the initial thread by another member.
We can safely ignore novel and novella since the forum post limit is around 50,000 characters, which is probably not enough for those two. I don't think we should allow multi-post entries.
I only gave a example, papermario, you said repeatedly (in every post?
) how you've been to so and so many contests, if you know of a more prestigious english oriented organization that works as well.
Of course if anyone else knows of another that works too.
Oh and, it should be a organization that has been active for some respectable period of time. The advatage of using the limits of prestigious contests is that we can rely on their wisdom for the past decade or so and thus using them as reference would mean the entire issue of word count doesn't require debating.