Hahahah, god, that yearly round-up meme was a pain in the ass, you're right. That's actually what made me think of doing monthly word counts to begin with, but then it turned into this contest with myself to write more more more and fail more too. But I do run into that problem, where you've written most of a fic one month, and then finished it off with two hundred words the next. That's why I count unfinished stuff - otherwise it just throws off the numbers, and that's bad for my purposes.

Tombs of Atuan! I really liked that one, and haven't gotten to The Farthest Shore yet. It gave me a crazy dream that turned into the backdrop for a story. I'd like to read anything you say about the book. Nobody geeks about it, really.

Old fantasy and SF is really good about packing content into small packages. Honestly, it seems like the current fantasy trend is to pack the books full of filler to make them longer when they'd be better at two or three hundred pages. Not everything is like that, but sometimes they go on and on and on.