My relationship with word limits has been difficult, to say the least. When I first began writing, I thought the word count meant something. I thought the more words you can write, the better you are. Ha, ha, let’s all have a good laugh about it now. This both negatively and positively impacted me. The first draft I ever wrote was under 80,000. I was just doing it for fun so it shouldn’t have mattered how many words I wrote but I knew a novel had to be long , so there were times I was adding in unnecessary bits, just so I could name it a novel , as opposed to another piece of writing. When I finally began to look into it, I didn’t really think ‘I should look this up’. No, I was more thinking about what it would look like, how many pages there would be, how thick it would be to hold it in my hands. I wanted to compare my word count to that of a book I had on the shelf. So, I went to the thickest book I had at the time: Brent Week’s The Way of the Shadows . The 183,135-word co...