Bi-Weekly Status -- December 28th

Looks like a bi-weekly status is more realistic, so that is what I will shoot for going forward.

Had some time off during the holiday so made quite a bit of progress, burned through about 7K words. However, there has been some strain on the family as I try to get more done and they want me to spend more time with them. Sadly, that means I need to throttle it back a little. This is after all a marathon, not a sprint and although I want to cut loose and dash for the finish line, the family does come first (just barely).

Made it to the last big twist and wrote a painfully long dialogue sequence (4500 words of talking). It contains info vital to the remainder of the story, establishes key relationships, but it is currently staged as six characters sitting in a room talking. That does the job, but it’s really boring. I’m already brainstorming ways to work around this--introducing a little more action and conflict into this area.

With the truncated ending, I can reasonably expect to have the rough draft finished in January, a readable draft finished in March and a marketable draft finished in May, though I plan to start querying in March (yes, I am that excited).

Here are the vital statistics (from Sunday Dec 14th):

Rough Draft 46211 words
1st Draft 22264 words
2nd Draft 15314 words

Total: 83789 words

And some stats on the support files:

Outline: 25331 words
Brainstorming: 22240 words