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August 21st, 2008

Word count -- Lycanthropy.

Here go:

Chapters revised so far: sixteen
Total words: 71,220
Reason for stopping: finished through chapter sixteen, so it was time to flip the draft.
Music: weird cover songs from Merav.
Lilly: somehow spread out to cover the entire pillow.

It's official: this book gets the award for 'best proof that Seanan needs to never take more than six months to write a fluffy book,' because it has some of the most spectacular continuity errors ever. So far, my lead has changed home towns twice inside of the text (the final home town: Red Wing, Minnesota), one of my secondary characters has changed species -- which somehow, nobody noticed -- and my antagonist has completely changed physical description. As these aren't supposed to be that sort of shapeshifter, well...

This is draft 1.5 so that I can worry about fixing these problems and smoothing out my sequencing and all that without worrying about making cuts to the text -- hence the word count creeping slowly but steadily upwards. When I hit the end of the draft and start in on the second draft, I'll start whacking away until I lose ten percent. On the plus side, I have Brooke, so that ten percent will be largely modifiers.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades. And not because I'm suffering from degenerative retinal Kellis-Amberlee, either.

Word count -- The Mourning Edition.

Current stats:

Words: 5,420.
Total words: 17,730.
Reason for stopping: chapter three is finished.
Music: Science Groove! Also, really weird cover songs.
Lilly: prowling around the room and spelunking in my dresser drawers.

This book remains both very comfortable -- it's a return to the world of Newsflesh! How could it be anything but comfortable? I love that world like burning -- and very complicated, since it's been a while since I first pulled Newsflesh off the ground and sent it racing downhill. And it's very weird to be doing this in tandem with the rewrite on Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues, because of the differences in scale. 'Barely started' for The Mourning Edition is the same as 'a third of the way' in Lycanthropy.

Soon, I get to start sinking my teeth into my gonzo zombie-verse virology in a big, big way, and that delights me all the way down to the bottom of my incurably geeky little soul. Also, I'm making substantially faster progress on this book than I did on the first one of the series, which I consider to be an awesomely good sign.

I'm king of the dead! Er, queen. Er...something.

Word count -- Lycanthropy.

Here go:

Chapters revised so far: twenty-eight
Total words: 71,225
Reason for stopping: I, uh, sort of ran out of book.
Music: weird cover songs from Merav.
Lilly: prowling madly about the room.

So I'm having a minor surgical procedure tomorrow -- a lumbar epidural, to help with my back pain issues -- and that means I'm all wound-up and twitchy. Wound tighter than a cheap cuckoo clock, that's me. And when I get wound-up, I either watch horror movies, or I write. Since the television is currently in use, well...

Draft 1.5 is now essentially done. Oh, I'll be sending it to my proofreaders for another pass, and I'll give it a week or so before I tackle it again, but it's time to stop playing about with fractions: it's time to commit to writing a second draft of the book. That's going to mean a loss of something like seven thousand words (and yes, Brooke, many of them will be 'largely'), and probably some changes that I can't even guess at yet, but the fabulous thing is?

You can't have a second draft without having a first draft. And now that I've finished laying down the spit and polish and plaster on the book as it currently stands, I feel like I really have a first draft. And I like it.

Finishing books is awesome.

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