Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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Word count -- DEADLINE.

Words: 4,606.
Total words: 92,007.
Estimated to go: 34,993.
Reason for stopping: done for tonight.
Music: mostly Meat Loaf and selections from Broadway.
Lilly and Alice: on the orange cat tree.

Tonight's word count is less based on "I have achieved some great goal," and more on "I am done for tonight and wanted to actually post about my progress for the first time this year." I've managed to break 90,000 words, which is pretty awesome; as you can see by the new column, "Estimated to go," I have a decent grasp of how much work is still ahead of me, and I'm on target to finish my first draft in a reasonable amount of time.

Deadline is the first book I've written while under contract, which has been an interesting experience for me. I'm used to setting all my own deadlines, creating a feeling of artificial urgency that's really just based on wanting to finish the book before it stops being a friend and starts becoming that house guest that just won't go the hell away. Now I have real deadlines, and real urgency. It's been less jarring than I was afraid it would be, probably because I had already written Feed when we sold the trilogy. I know where I'm going, I know how I'm going to get there, and now all that's left is finding out where I'll be stopping along the way.

I figure that from here, all the territory is familiar and awesome, and that's pretty damn cool. My focus is starting to narrow as I knock the short stories and blog posts off my "to do" list, honing in on what really matters: the end of the world.

When will you rise?
Tags: deadline, word count, zombies
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  • 2 comments
haha wow. You're amazing. My whole novel draft is only a few thousand more words than your 'estimated to go' =P
I can't even imagine 90,000 words!
An average Toby novel is 101,000 to 109,000 words long (the latter figure applies only to book four, which may still be trimmed down). The Newsflesh books run around 125,000 words each, which is what I'm using for my "words to go" estimate.