hey, @artgirl.
I'll tag in here since @abh12345 mentioned me. :)
The answer about musing comments is, yes, the comments definitely count. The problem is, as @abh12345 said, the characters, or the words you write, end up somewhere that doesn't show up when Asher goes to compile the amount of characters you typed. So, you'll get credit for the comments, just not the characters. To work around that, I've been copying what I wrote in musing and pasting it into the comment that shows up in your comment feed through Steemit or whatever UI you want to use. It's an inconvenience, but it's the only way I've found to have the characters counted accurately.