I never put limits on myself, nor do I set out to make a story a certain length. However many chapters it takes me to write the story I want to tell is how many chapters long the story will be.
The type of plot, the way I go about planning it, and my writing style tend to dictate the length. With most of my stories, I plot the major points in advance, but don't necessarily plan in great detail how I'll get from Point A to Point B to Point C. I think that's why stories like Broken and BMS got to be so long, because I let my writing take more of the long and winding road between those points LOL. They would have been shorter if I'd gotten rid of the subplots and just focused on the main storyline.
With Curtain Call, I really did stick to one storyline, and it was still long. With that one, I just had a timeline, and for each point on the timeline, I had to decide if that was an important enough event to warrant a scene in the story or if I could just summarize it and skip past it. I wrote the ones that I thought added something to the story I wanted to tell and let it go on as long as it needed to. That story was about a journey, and it was important for me to show that journey from beginning to end.
Secrets of the Heart is the first story I plotted out literally chapter by chapter. I knew I needed to plan it out in advance because of the way I wanted to weave together two intertwining storylines and make sure they worked together. With that one, I always knew it was going to be a set number of chapters, and that number was a lot smaller than in previous stories. I think my outline started out as 27 or 28 chapters, and I've since revised it and pared it down to 25. Shocking, I know! LOL
I will say, I have this OCD thing about numbers, where I like stories to end on round numbers. Like for Secrets, I was glad to get the outline down to 25 chapters because 25 is a better number than 27 or 28. For Broken and BMS, I worked really hard to make each part 50 chapters long, even if it meant making the chapters leading up to each 50 a little longer or shorter than normal. I was so determined to end BMS on an even 200 chapters and not 201 that I invented a "Post Epilogue" to go after the Epilogue LOL. I have this thing with numbers in real life too, especially with the volume on my TV. I prefer it to be set on a multiple of 5, but an even number will work too... never a prime number, though! *shudder*
