accomplishedTotal words: 104,023.
Reason for stopping: I need to eat dinner, or I am going to die.
Music: random shuffle.
Lilly and Alice: somewhere in the house, and conked out on the bed, respectively.
So it's been a little while since I've provided a concrete update on this book. I could make excuses about how busy I've been, but really, it's that for a while, updates have been borderline impossible, because my progress hasn't been something I could quantify. Have I been writing? Yes, I have. But half of what I've been doing has been revising, or taking old scenes, feeding them through the wood chipper, and stapling them back together in a new order. I've cut sub-plots and scenes, replacing them with new, stronger sub-plots and scenes. And it's been exhausting and hard to exactly measure.
But I think I'm a little more confident about my progress now, especially since this book is projected to be done when it hits somewhere around 107,500 words. I'm probably going to write to about 109,000 words, thus giving myself a little wiggle room when it comes to finding the (many many many) things that need cutting. And then I'm going to send it off to the Machete Squad and The Agent, and buckle down on my next set of projects: Blackout, Ashes of Honor, and Midnight Blue-Light Special.
I really am astonishingly excited about what One Salt Sea is turning into. This is so much better of a book than I thought it was going to be, and that's in first draft form, before the people who keep me honest have taken their shots at it. When they're done?
It's gonna be amazing.
