word count | Stephanie Flint - Author and Artist

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September 6, 2025 · 8:55 am

Story Length in the Wishing Blade Universe

When I set out to write The Wishing Blade series, I originally planned on it being a set of novellas. (Especially because the very first draft I wrote for the entire story arc of the series was 64,000 words).

Magic’ Stealing, the first book I published in the Wishing Blade series, was around 34,000 words, and I figured that future books would be similar.

What I didn’t count on was adding so many more words once I started exploring additional points of view.

Daernan got a chance to shine in The Shadow War, and the main plot really centers around him. Siklana has a major role and character arc in Magebane… and we still get the original views of Toranih and Shevanlagiy.

Not only were viewpoints added, I ended up further developing, and adding, magic systems (who knew word magic and charlago/magebane would play such a critical role in future stories?), and I added words as I reworked scenes to make more sense. Because Isaac–my writing partner and developmental editor–has a point: why try scaling a guarded wall when you could just… I dunno… take the sewers and discover even more fun stuff that affects the plot?

The result was that The Shadow War ended up clocking in around 55,000 words – a short novel, and Magebane clocked in at a whopping 109,000 words – a full-length novel.

(Fun fact… the first version of this post, sent to my newsletter years ago, had Magebane still in progress at 89,000 words.)

The Stone and String stories have also found themselves with longer stories than I originally planned. “Stone and String” was a short story of 8,000 words (surprisingly, it stayed within its expected count). It was meant to be a standalone story. But, of course, I wondered what happened next…

And so Wind and Words came along. While it took a couple starts to actually get it going the direction I wanted, I realized quickly it wasn’t going to be a short story. It ended up being a novella at 23,000 words.

Now the real question is, how long are the next books going to be? (Especially considering that Stone and String 3 should have direct ties to Wishing Blade 4).

While I cringe to look at the release dates of those books and realize I haven’t yet released the next in the series, I’ve found a similar pattern occurring within The Legends of Cirena series as it progresses.

The Wind Mage of Maijev – 15,000 words
The Gryphon and the Mountain Bear – 12,000 words
The Restless Sands of Neel – 25,000 words
The Cursed Halls of Kalecen – 18,000 words
The Scars of Her Past – 21,000 words
The Dragons of the Mist – 21,000 words
The Wind Mage and the Wolf (Cross-over) – 47,000 words
The Trial of Bells and Blood (Cross-over) – 32,000 words
The Dark Forest of Aneth (Cross-over) – WORK-IN-PROGRESS Currently 68,000 words.
- In its defense, it not only has the cross-over points of view, it got a third viewpoint and is delving into preplanned lore that wraps up the arc from the first 9 books while setting up the next arc. 🫣

I think a lot of this has to do with adding characters, getting deeper into the lore… stuff like that.

There’s a couple drafts already written for stories that will eventually come after The Dark Forest of Aneth, which you might have seen if you’re signed up for the Wishing Blade Universe newsletter. And then there’s the ongoing story which definitely is building into pre-planned lore and I don’t know if it’s going to be a novella or novel, but the next chapter is eight of sixteen, and it’s already 17,000 words long.

Anyhow, do you have a preferred book length you prefer to read or write?

Full-length novels, novellas, short stories? 🙂

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Three series starters…

Quick reminder… you can read Stone and String for free by signing up to my newsletter!

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Happy reading and writing!

Thoughts on Writing – Writing A Serial Novel – MVChron Midpoint Evaluation

Now that Isaac and I have reached the midpoint of The Multiverse Chronicles (or what was originally going to be the midpoint), I thought it might be fun to look at what we had planned for this series, and what the current trajectory is.

For those of you who are new to my blog, The Multiverse Chronicles is a pseudo-steampunk fantasy blog series that my husband and I write. Isaac writes the rough draft for each episode, which I then edit. We send that draft to a beta-reader, who gives us feedback. We polish the episode, and then post it to our blog (approximately once a week between episodes).

The series started because we wanted a way to advertise our Battle Decks: Trials of Blood and Steel card game. So we worked out more of the universe and wrote it into story format. (Fun Fact: The story came from the card game, but the card game from a story… which came from a role-play game Isaac game-mastered and created the world for. It’s just one big cycle.)

When we first planned the series, we thought they’d be short little episodes, each an individual story following the lives of various characters who we occasionally revisited (actually, we first pictured this as a comic strip). As the story progressed, certain themes would reoccur and a larger story arc would appear, but would only be important to those who read the whole series.

That didn’t happen.

The story evolved to have a full-blown plot. Even then, we determined that we would still keep the episodes short (around 500-1500 words), and we would keep some level of independent story from episode to episode, that way new readers could fall in at any time and be able to reasonably follow what was going on.

Ahem.

Let’s take a look at the actual word count of the first twelve episodes, shall we?

Prologue: 478

Episode 1: 2,318

Episode 2: 3,287

Episode 3: 2,771

Episode 4: 3,395

Episode 5: 3,829

Episode 6: 2,202

Episode 7: 3,082

Episode 8: 3,660

Episode 9: 2,760

Episode 10: 2,018

Episode 11: 3,918

Episode 12: 4,226

Ignoring the prologue, which we added at the last minute because we wanted to have at least some reference of why we call this “The Multiverse Chronicles,” the episodes are well above the intended length.

Granted, a lot of that is my fault. I like details. I want to see the world…

And I enjoy knowing what the bad guys are doing.

Isaac’s original drafts are closer to the intended length (for example, the original draft of the first episode is only 1,645 words long, and episode twelve was only 1,672 words long (note: this does not include the end scene, which was added later and raised the total count to 2,591 words).

Combined,the total word count for the first twelve episodes without the prologue is 37,466 words, with an average of 3,122 words per episode.

That’s double the original word count we had in mind.

Adding to the word count was the decision to add “Meanwhile“scenes at the end of each episode to show what other characters, especially the antagonists, were up to. The idea was to build suspense. Per feedback from our beta-reader, we later stopped calling them “Meanwhile” scenes and just made them a part of the regular episode, albeit with a section break.

What remained as planned, however, was to have an illustration with each story, hearkening back to the idea of penny dreadfuls and dime novels. Though the style and number of illustration varies a bit from episode to episode, we try to have at least something.

Originally we planned to have 24 episodes, though looking at our current structure, we now have 27 episodes planned, and I haven’t checked to see if any of the remaining episodes need to be split into two parts (as we did with one of the earlier episodes, and the two episodes we’ll be releasing next).

Once the first season has been released, I’m hoping to go back through the full story, make any final changes and polish the writing, and then publish a print and ebook edition. But that’s a post for another day.

Though we deviated from our original plans, I hope that readers will still enjoy The Multiverse Chronicles. And please, feel free to chime in with thoughts and comments as you read each episode. We would love to hear from you. 🙂

Previous posts about the serialization process:

Thoughts on Publishing – Serial Publishing Methods

Thoughts on Writing – What does a Serial Episode Need?