When starting a new project....

Do you plan out how long it will be? Just curious.

I follow a ton of writer's blogs and a lot of times I see the little WIP meter on the sidebar. So, it appears that they know when starting a project, how many words it will be once completed.

I usually have a round about number I want to be in. For example, A Bitch Named Karma is rather short, only 72,000 words. I never planned it that way...that's just where the story ended. But I knew when I wrote my next book, Spellbound, that I wanted it to be more of a commercial length- between 85,000 and 90,000. After all the edits and rewrites and such, it's complete at 92,000.

I am now writing a sequel to A Bitch Named Karma and I would like it to be around the same length as the first, because I don't know...it's a sequel and it feels like it should be that way.