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.

Here go:

Words: 4,780
Total words: 49,140
Reason for stopping: finished chapter nineteen.
Music: the mid-80s section of my Lycanthropy play list.
Lilly: trying hard to ignore me, because I made her stop licking the keyboard.

And then we had our FIRST BIG BOOM. Because everybody needs a FIRST BIG BOOM. I have all my primary characters at this point (including the seemingly obligatory Major Character I Didn't Anticipate Being A Major Character), all my guns are on the wall and all my plot points are rather firmly in place, and I'm merrily anticipating the downhill slope from here to the conclusion of the book. It's been somewhat hampered by deadlines -- both self-imposed and external -- on the Toby books, but with the first two of those out of their really heavy lifting phase, I'm finally able to concentrate a little more tightly on Clady.

(And yes, Newsflesh remains high on the priority list. It's just that it's still in that lovely 'settling' phase while I try to figure out where to make the changes that need making, while Clady's story, well...I want to know what happens next!)

The delays have actually been really good for the story, overall; I now know everything that happens in book two (Sit, Stay, I Love You) a lot more intimately than I did, say, six months ago. But wow, do I feel accomplished today!

Today, I begin doing the major surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation. This is, honestly, one of my favorite parts of the writing process. The book is done -- for certain values of 'done' -- and I can see the entire shape of it, all stretched out upon my screen like a patient etherized upon a table. Now I can start determining which of its major organs it really doesn't need, which ones can be easily extracted, and which ones need a little more beefing up. It's a really rewarding period in the evolution of the text.

I managed to get some work done on Lycanthropy yesterday -- not as much as I would have done on, say, a day when I wasn't down with Martian death flu, but since I'm sick, and a next-day review of the text has shown it to be pretty darn good, I'm a happy girl. Clady is just plain fun to write for. I can't wait until everyone else gets to meet her.

Also on the happy-happy joy-joy side of things, when I finish the surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation and send it off, I should be able to take a month or so off from playing in Toby's backyard to address the changes I've been wanting to make in Newsflesh. Because everything is better with zombies. Even chocolate chip cookies. And since I have steadfastly refused to allow my love for the living dead to insert them into any of my other ongoing series (except for Deathless, but that's a special case, given my protagonist), I figure I deserve a little bit of a zombie break. ZOMBIE BREAK!!!!!

Life is good. There's so much writing to be done!