It's about 75000 words.
Also, thanks... That's what I kept telling myself. <shrug> I feel a little silly for worrying about it, really.
First post, so I thought I'd give my input on something I have at least some idea about :L
75,000 words could be fine, depending on the structure. Word length is the most brute measure of stucture integrity there is, sort of like looking at a company's assets to determine how profitable it is. But, there are some things to look at that will give you some idea about what your ideal word length is likely to be:
1) The central idea of your story. Orson Scott Card teaches in his symposia that there are really only 4 types: Character, Idea, Event and Mileu. If you've heard his shpeil, you'll know what I'm talking about and can adjust, otherwise I'll just asusme the story is an Event story, since most Fantasy is. An event puts the world out of balance somehow and the characters struggle to restore it. These tend to be shorter than Character stories, but longer than Mileu stories.
2) The type of conflict. There's a spectrum of physical/psychological conflict, with each story striking its own balance without ever going to one extreme. The more physical your conflict is the shorter your story will be. Fantasy usually has very physical conflict themes.
3) Your choice of scene versus summary. This is where 90% of the problems with word length come from. Every scene has some measure of summary, and the best structured stories have as much summary as the reader expects and/or wants. The quickest reading stories use summary very well. Publishers want the story to be quick reading as much as they want it to be cheapt to print, so they too want more summary. BUT... Tolkien wrote with one of the widest scene/summary ratios of any author with his kind of popularity. Fantasy readers almost expect you to drone on about how the mountains in your world look, for example. So, you as an author need to decide for yourself how you'll structure your writiting. There's really no incorrect decision here as long as you're consistent; you just need to and alter your expectations of word length accordingly.
But assuming that all three of the above conform more or less to the typical idea of what mainstream, high Fantasy should be, 70,000 to 90,000 sounds about right. Most books that go over 90,000 is because the writer failed to clip enough scenes or wanted to include more than necessary for some personal purpose of his/hers. You should also keep in mind that at the novice level the ratio of stories that are too short to those that are too long is about 10:1, but at the professional level that ratio is almost exactly inverse.
Just my $.0.02
