Word Count · 2:58pm Apr 16th, 2014
I won't pretend that I understand what the hell goes on with the word count on this site. On GDocs, it tells me that I have 4842, which is not the 5000 I want per chapter for the story I'm writing. If I replace all the dashes, hyphens, brackets, slashes and apostrophes with spaces, it still only gives me 4999, literally as close to my goal as possible while being under. FimFiction tells me that I have 5030, which means that I've reached my minimum length. I have no idea where those extra thirty-one words are coming from, and it actually bothers me. How many of the stories with just over a thousand words actually have fewer? Can I even trust the FimFiction word count for longer stories, or are they actually hundreds—maybe thousands—of words off?
I know it doesn't seem like much, but it's one of those things that tickles the back of your mind. Before, it was a half-dozen words here, a dozen there. Now that my chapters are getting longer, it feels like it's inflated beyond what I should be able to claim as my own writing, even if only by a hundred words.
-HB
From what I've noticed, fimfiction counts words like "haven't", "won't", "didn't" etc. as two separate words (it assumes that apostrophies divide the words). The longer the story, the bigger the difference. For example, according to MLP Fanart wiki, Fallout: Equestria is about 607k words long. On fimfiction it's over 620k...