Here go:

Words: 3,120
Total words: 52,260
Reason for stopping: finished chapter twenty.
Music: lots of Death Cab for Cutie.
Lilly: sleeping.

Having weathered the first big boom (which happened in chapter nineteen), I have now accomplished the Recovering From The Big Boom And Planning To Move Forward part of the book. Vitally important, and a place where I frequently tend to stall out. What's more, since I hit chapter, I get to devote the rest of the evening to my current, well-beloved drop-in chapter for Newsflesh. Zombies make everything better!

(Having processed a great many edits on A Local Habitation this morning, it occurs to me that I will go to bed tonight after spending quality time with the fae, a bunch of teenage lycanthropes, and the living dead. There are days when I realize that I am, in fact, living the life I dreamed about when I was in high school.)

This book remains projected at somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 words for a first draft. I'm starting to think it's going to come down fairly squarely in the 72,000 word neighborhood, which will leave it around 65,000 in the second draft. That's a respectable length, and I'm not going to sneeze at it. Besides, I really like these people. They're fun to hang around with.

Life is good.

Updated book stats:

Total words: 156,890*
Total chapters: thirty-one chapters, divided into five 'books' and a coda.
Total pages: 574.
Started: September 4th, 2005, on the plane back from Seattle.
Finished: December 27th, 2007, sitting at Tony's kitchen table, in Seattle.
Updates finished: June 3rd, 2008, in my bedroom.

After six months of being allowed to sit quietly in a drawer maturing, I'm finally starting the process of line-editing and revising Feed, my epic novel of zombies, politics, blogging, how George Romero accidentally saved the world and the tragic duty of the journalist. I forgot how much this book excites me just by existing. I love the setting, I love the characters, and I love the structure of it all.

Now it's time to really get down to brass tacks, and start beating this baby into shape. Even assuming the standard 10% loss between drafts, it's going to remain the longest thing I've ever written -- and quite frankly, I think it's the best.

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.

(*After the additions requested by my first draft proofreading list, this is an increase of 6,802 words. Which is a very amusing number.)