Deirdre, here's a good rule of thumb regarding chapter length...

Posted by Goodsport from adsl-216-102-199-185.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net on March 12, 2000 at 13:49:04:

In Reply to: 9 posted by Deirdre Campbell on March 12, 2000 at 09:29:52:

: Hi, About Chapter #9,... it's quite long. What do I do now? Should I divide it into two Chapters, or shorten it?

There's no need to shorten what you've wrote. Instead, when you have your Chapter in Word 97 (or Word whatever), go to the Tools tab, clickon Word Count, and look at the Characters (with spaces) line. If the Chapter has up to 26,000-28,000 characters, than your Chapter should fit in a single posting. If it has more, then you may want to split the Chapter into two Chapters (most likely somewhere in the middle of the original Chapter, as not to make one of the Chapters super-short).

I found this out when I wrote Chapters 53 and 54 of the Tessa story. I actually wrote the whole thing as one Chapter (it was originally just supposed to be Chapter 53), but I then found out that it all wouldn't fit on one posting here, so I split it into two Chapters.

And don't forget... HTML tags and those special characters you make for indentations do count against the Characters (with spaces) count, but I think that pressing the ENTER key (to create spacing between paragraphs) does not.

Hope that helped! :)

-G

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Grazie! DC 14:52:00 3/12/2000 (0)

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:  : Hi, About Chapter #9,... it's quite long. What do I do now? Should I divide it into two Chapters, or shorten it?

: 
:       There's no need to shorten what you've wrote. Instead, when you have your Chapter in Word 97 (or Word whatever), go to the Tools tab, clickon Word Count, and look at the Characters (with spaces) line. If the Chapter has up to 26,000-28,000 characters, than your Chapter should fit in a single posting. If it has more, then you may want to split the Chapter into two Chapters (most likely somewhere in the middle of the original Chapter, as not to make one of the Chapters super-short).

:       I found this out when I wrote Chapters 53 and 54 of the Tessa story.  I actually wrote the whole thing as one Chapter (it was originally just supposed to be Chapter 53), but I then found out that it all wouldn't fit on one posting here, so I split it into two Chapters.

:       And don't forget... HTML tags and those special characters you make for indentations do count against the Characters (with spaces) count, but I think that pressing the ENTER key (to create spacing between paragraphs) does not.

:       Hope that helped! :)

: 
: -G

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