Mr Too Dogs,
While I appreciate your nice comments on my writing, word-count cannot be "ignored" by any magazine writer these days--unless they want real trouble from the magazine's editor and owner. And in this instance the magazine's owner also happens to be Jeremiah's father.
Along with writing close to 3000 articles for various magazines over the decades, I have also spent several years as the head editor for three magazines. Had several writers try to whip out articles for all three, going long over my requested word-count--and justified it by suggesting that it was "the editor's job" to cut them down to size. I assured the first guy who tried this was NOT the editor's job, for a couple of reasons:
First, I'd written for several magazines by then, and found that the more finished my submissions were (including word-count) the more money I was paid. Second, a magazine editor's main job is to provide an array of articles in each issue, appealing to a variety of readers. This involves reading a LOT of submissions, which is far more important than editing some lazy writer's too-long article.
The guy who insisted it was my job to edit/cut down articles sent in 5000 words, which very few magazines published even back then--and I'd asked for 2000. It was actually relatively easy to cut it down to 2000, by eliminating entire pages that essentially repeated the same information as other pages. But it also took over an hour, which I could have used for reading at least 2-3 other submissions. That writer never got another assignment from me.
