Words: 4,229.
Total words: 12,005.
Reason for stopping: I have finished chapter three, and need to get dressed.
Music: lots of dance club music.
The cats: Lilly and Thomas, in the bed, Alice, prowling.

So chapter three is done. True to form, I have realized that the current chapter one is actually chapter two, and my next addition to this book will be the shiny new chapter one (also allowing me to move some of the "As you know, Bob..." into the new chapter one, thus distributing it a little bit better). I'm getting used to this particular quirk of my writing life, and while it still annoys me a bit, it no longer infuriates me. Yay for maturity!

Mouse exaltation of the day: "HAIL THE FAILURE TO IGNITE THE DOMICILE!" Gotta love the Aeslin mice. They are, without a doubt, worth their weight in kittens.

Let's see, other things I've realized...I have a misnamed cryptid race that's going to get corrected before Discount Armageddon is released, so you'll never know for sure what it was, but I need to make a note before I start working up my family field guides. Verity remains refreshing and awesome, even when she's annoyed, because she just can't stay annoyed for very long without outside assistance. And I think I need to find a source for So You Think You Can Dance Australia. It's...research. Yeah, that's the ticket.

What's sad is that in this case, it actually is.

Words: 2,026.
Total words: 10,017.
Reason for stopping: my head hurts.
Music: random shuffle. An unusual amount of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Cats: Lilly, cat tree; Thomas, bedroom floor; Alice, same.

I'm stopping not because I've reached the end of a chapter—I haven't—but because my head is killing me, which means my painkillers are wearing off, which means it's time to do something less important than working on the final book in the Newsflesh trilogy. You know, like taking more pills and crying into my pillow until sweet unconsciousness comes to claim me. The fun thing to do on a Sunday night!

I remain very pleased, and somewhat daunted, with the way this book is going. I'm trying not to think too hard about how much I have left to go before I come to the ending; instead, I'm focusing on the fact that every page I finish is one page closer to the conclusion, which is going to be mind-blowing. For me, if for no one else. I mean, this is going to be the first series I've ever actually finished, and while yes, that makes me a little nervous, it's also one of those incredible milestones that every author dreams of.

We're more than 10,000 words into the story. That means there's no turning back now, and you know what? I'm glad.

Words: 3,639.
Total words: 3,639.
Reason for stopping: chapter one is finished at last!
Music: mostly modern folk.
The cats: Lilly, bed; Thomas, floor by my feet; Alice, unknown.

Chapter one of the sixth Toby book is finally done! I hate first chapters. I have like, a 20% success rate with first chapters—almost every first chapter I've ever written has had to be chucked out the window and replaced with something else by the end of the draft. Sadly, this doesn't mean I get to start books on chapter two and go back later to fill in the "how we got in this hand basket" part of the narrative. But oh, how I wish I could.

The really fascinating thing about starting a book this far into an ongoing series is how vague I have to get in posts like this one, because otherwise, I'm giving away who lives, who dies, and who has been transformed into a piece of garden statuary for mouthing off to the Queen of the Mists one time too many. But it's so nice to be making progress, and it's so nice to finally be getting my teeth into this adventure, which has been simmering patiently away on the back burner for ages while I fought my way through One Salt Sea.

Today we're going to jump high, cheer loud, and look pretty, y'all.

Word.

Words: 3,982.
Total words: 7,776.
Reason for stopping: I have finished chapter two, and need to get dressed.
Music: lots of dance club music.
The cats: all three of them are in the bed. It's freaky.

Chapter two is done! Chapter two is done! I really meant to be further along in this book by now, but, well...new kitten, major flu, Alice nearly dying, OryCon, and extensive revisions on One Salt Sea mucked things up a bit. I'm getting back on track, and the first step was getting this chapter locked down. What's that? Is that a finished chapter? Why yes, I do believe that it is. CHEESE AND CAKE!

I love the InCryptid setting. It manages to be incredibly grim and serious, and incredibly light and fluffy, all at the same time. I often say that if we're working with a seriousness scale of one to ten, with Newsflesh being an eight or nine, and Toby being a six or seven, InCryptid is a two or three (except when it's not). And wow, is it refreshing to be able to say "you know what? You don't want to hear me, you just want to dance."

I think I'm going to work up an end-of-book "cryptid handbook" for the published books, including the names of the various cryptid species, and short descriptions of same. This will help a lot, with a lot of things, including my firm desire not to completely re-explain the cuckoos in every single volume.

I'm so excited!

Words: 3,477.
Total words: 7,921.
Reason for stopping: I have finished chapter two.
Music: random shuffle. A great many Browncoat songs.
Cats: Lilly, bed; Thomas, floor; Alice, sulking under the couch.

Chapter two is done. This book is officially off the ground, and while I have a long way to go before I can see the exit—like, somewhere in the neighborhood of 138,000 words of "a long way to go"—everything has a beginning, and this one is now solid.

Writing this book is going to be a really interesting exercise, because there's so much I can't talk about. Not won't or don't want to, actually can't, as any discussion would constitute spoilers for the first two books in the trilogy. Suffice to say, it's a challenge, and it's going to get harder before it gets easier, but I'm very, very excited to be writing it. I was nowhere near good enough to write this book three years ago.

Let's see if I'm good enough to write it today, shall we?

Draft 1.5 stats:

Words: 114,115
Pages: 419
Chapters: thirty-five
Started: I have absolutely no idea
Finished: November 15th, 2010

As is pretty much always the case, as soon as I finished One Salt Sea, I turned around and did some serious revisions, trimming the language, clarifying the action, unsnarling the timeline, and totally replacing several chapters. As is also pretty much always the case, this process made the book unutterably better. Seriously, this is an infinitely better book than it was two weeks ago, and also, it's still finished.

I'm currently waiting for feedback from The Agent and my proofing pool, after which I will make final pre-editorial changes and ship the whole thing off to The Editor, saving my sanity and allowing me to get to work on Ashes of Honor. I'm starting to get excited about this prospect. I get to find out what happens next! And, y'know, consequentially, so do you.

Eventually.

Words: 3,794.
Total words: 3,794.
Reason for stopping: The Agent called. Hence my posting this the next morning.
Music: lots of dance club music.
Lilly and Alice: cat tree and STALKING, respectively.

What's this? Why, it's the first official word count for Midnight Blue-Light Special, of course. What's that? The second InCryptid book, and the sequel to Discount Armageddon. In short, my reward for finishing the fifth Toby book is the sweet, sweet embrace of ballroom dancers who spend their spare time acting as a guidance counselor for monsters, talking mice, brooding monster-hunters, and mathematicians with anti-freeze where their blood is supposed to be. Because that's just how I roll.

I have the first chapter and prologue done, and Very is starting to respond to my request that she pay attention to the plot outline. For Very, this is very rapid adherence to the rules of the road, and I'm extremely proud of her. And yes, she's a fictional character, but I haven't been working with her for a while, so I have to remember how all this works.

I'm back in the cryptid-filled streets of New York City, and I couldn't be more pleased about it if I tried.

Current stats:

Words: 8,719.
Total words: 116,192.
Reason for stopping: I sort of, well, ran out of book.
Music: random shuffle, heavy on the Broadway.
Lilly and Alice: I have no idea. That's probably not good.

First draft stats:

Pages: 428
Chapters: thirty-five
Started: I have absolutely no idea
Finished: October 30, 2010

I am...oh my sweet Great Pumpkin, you guys, I am finally done. The book is currently about 5,000 words longer than it's going to be when it's turned in, because the final draft needs to be 111,000 words, not 116,000, but this is my first draft, and it's finally done. I have finally written an ending to the Toby book that would not die. Draft one is finished. I know how it ends. After all this time, I know how it ends, and it makes sense, and it hangs together, and it needs some paint and fixing up and everything, but...

But it's done. One Salt Sea is done.

I need a hug.

Words: 2,871.
Total words: 107,473.
Reason for stopping: once again, it's bed time.
Music: The Rocky Horror Glee Show.
Lilly and Alice: glaring at me from their nest of pillows.

Tonight's word count is a little shaky, since that's the end-of-night total, after a) I wrote for two hours solid, and b) I made a whole bunch of edits, most of which involved deleting (I always overwrite in my first draft, because it's easier to cut than it is to come up with new text at the eleventh hour). So I probably wrote around 3,500 tonight, but as the final total is 2,871, we're going to roll with that. Either way, this is me, calling the time of done:

I estimate a completed first draft by the stroke of midnight on October 30th. I will finish this book before the new year begins, or I will probably have been hit by a bus while trying to do so. Because I am that close to finishing. I know who, and where, and what, and why (which is often more than poor Toby knows).

There's going to be a lot of rewriting, because there always is. There are bricks that need to become pillows, and pillows that need to become bricks. There is dialog to add, tighten, and delete entirely, and there are scenes that need serious revision. But the first draft, the starting point, is going to be done by Saturday night.

All I need now is a white plastic belt.

Words: 3,011.
Total words: 104,602.
Reason for stopping: bedtime!
Music: mostly the Counting Crows.
Lilly and Alice: glaring at me from their nest of pillows.

I feel like my word count needs a little explanation.

So when I had to throw out literally a hundred pages of this book, I didn't delete them all at once. Instead, I kept them at the back of the living manuscript, and every time I wrote X number of words, I would delete the same number from the text that was now considered "out of canon." This had two useful effects. First, it let me salvage certain things that I knew I wanted to keep, without leaving them as floating out-of-context fragments in a file somewhere. Secondly, it kept me from totally losing my shit, since suddenly going from "most of a book" to "a few chapters" is terrifying enough without your word count going back to zero.

All this is by way of explaining how I could have just written 3,000 words to wind up with a word count barely 600 words more than last night's word count. But more importantly, this is the real word count. I have finally deleted the last major chunks of the old book, leaving me with only those few scenes that I know I still need to re-incorporate. As of tonight, One Salt Sea is wholly and entirely itself, free of old identities and old ideas.

I'm both elated and terrified, because this really isn't the book I originally thought that I was writing. It's something better. It's almost the true sequel to Rosemary and Rue: it resolves a lot of the plot threads the first book left dangling, while introducing still more. It's a better book than I could have written two years ago. And it's still scary as hell.

But it's almost over. So I guess I better get used to the terror.

Words: 3,022.
Total 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.

Words: 4,444.
Total words: 4,444.
Reason for stopping: I have finished chapter one.
Music: random shuffle. Lots of angry rock.
Lilly and Alice: flopped on the bed.

Well.

I just wrote an entire first chapter in one long sitting. Like, the whole thing. Beginning, middle, end. I'm just saying. That's a thing. Anyway, here we go again. I recommend hanging onto your seats, because it's going to be a bumpy-ass ride.

Rise up while you can.

Words: 3,001.
Total words: 45,578.
Reason for stopping: I have to go to rehearsal, and I've finished chapter twelve.
Music: mostly the Counting Crows.
Lilly and Alice: prowling around the bedroom, sensing my imminent departure.

And now we hit the point at which The Brightest Fell stands up in a field with its arms spread, shouts, "FUCK YOU, I'M AN ANTEATER!" and goes trundling off to do whatever the hell it feels like it, whether I like it or not. Seriously, the outline has just gone out the window, where it can be used as nesting material by the local crows. And the book is SO MUCH BETTER as a consequence. Sometimes my characters give me a headache.

Highlights from this session involve fun with physics and the difficulties of getting good help these days. Also Alice bringing me a dead mouse, three times, before I finally gave in and allowed her to flush it down the toilet, because I am a total pushover.

I'm not going to pretend that this book is suddenly at a stage where it's going to become fun and easy, but it's definitely swinging along a lot faster and more sanely than it was before, which is a pretty bad-ass change, and I think I'm really going to like where it's going. Hopefully, you will, too, but while I write the final draft for everyone else, I write the first draft for me. And right now, I'm making me pretty damn happy.

Go team Toby.

Words: 4,741.
Total words: 42,577.
Reason for stopping: I have reached the end of chapter eleven. I need air.
Music: the entire collection, on random.
Lilly and Alice: sniffing my picnic basket and on the cat tree, respectively.

This may seem like a less impressive word count than last night's 37k, but since that was "revised and official text to date," and this is "one night's hard work," I'm going to call it a win. Also, I feel like I've been ridden madly over the moors for most of a night, and I didn't even get a nice bucket of oatmeal cookies for my troubles. Tired author is tired, and about to retire to the bath.

The Brightest Fell is turning into a real book, with a real point and purpose behind it, and with real ideas about where the narrative is supposed to go. I'm going to spend a chunk of this weekend redoing my outline, since half of it has gone out the damn window, but the book is so much unutterably better for it that I'm not actually complaining. Just, you know. Whining a little. It's so nice to be back in Toby's world, hanging out with all these crazy-train fairy tale rejects and dealing with their even crazier, even trainier, problems. Lots of crazy in this one.

Next up, I attempt to get enough finished text that I can pretend to be at least a novella. Also, I take a nice long nap.

Words: 37,836.
Total words: 37,836.
Reason for stopping: There are not words for how very "bedtime" it is right now.
Music: Alice trying to get me to go to bed.
Lilly and Alice: On the bed, and trying to order me to bed, respectively.

So yeah. Welcome back to the word counter for The Brightest Fell, aka, "Toby Daye, book five," aka, "this is the song that never ends." I have officially been working on this book since the dawn of time, largely because it's always been book five, and hence, very far away on the horizon. There was always room for something else to be higher-priority, and knock it to the back of the queue. Guess what, queue? Not anymore!

Anyway, The Brightest Fell is finally moving forward in a smooth, comprehensible, and I strongly suspect sustainable manner, which is weird but sort of awesome. It has been very much informed by all the things I've learned about being a writer from the first four, and by all the things I've learned about Toby herself from the first four, the short stories, and the prequel that you won't be seeing for a while yet. It's making me really happy, and also weirding me out more than a little, because dude, it's becoming a book. A book that currently spends a lot of time flipping me off, but still, a book.

I make progress! I dance the dance of joy. And now I sleep.

Words: 14,029
Total words: 138,737.
Estimated to go: 6,063.
Reason for stopping: This is actually from last night. It was time to stop writing and get some sleep.
Music: Lady GaGa, Glee, the Counting Crows, and the cats complaining about being ignored.
Lilly and Alice: probably asleep right now, the little feline traitors.

So despite my somewhat belated realization that the book was 20,000 words longer than I originally thought it was going to be, things are chugging right along, and I'm on target to finish the first draft this weekend. Luckily, I have Sooj and K showing back up at my place on Monday, thus giving me an excuse to celebrate successful completion with cupcakes. My current estimates say that I'm a chapter and a half and the coda away from being done done done-y mcdonecakes. Whee!

(I also have a list of elements/themes to look for during the revision, and things that either need to be tightened up, redacted for being unnecessary, or reworded to make sense to people who don't think reading about the life-cycle of Ebola is fun. But that's what the second draft is for.)

I feel both insanely accomplished and very sort of shell-shocked, like this is the beginning of the ending. I've grown to really love this world and these characters. I've been a horror girl all my life, and Feed was my first horror novel, and Newsflesh my first horror series. But now book two is ending, and book three will only last a year, and then...

Well, then, I guess it's back to the drawing board to find something else to scare me. Six thousand words to go.

We're almost there.

Words: 21,383.
Total words: 124,708.
Estimated to go: 20,292.
Reason for stopping: ...I appear to have just finished Book IV. I think that makes it time to stop for the night.
Music: random shuffle, heavy on the Rob Zombie. It seems appropriate.
Lilly and Alice: bed and cat tree, respectively.

Holy crap.

That is all.

Words: 3,086.
Total words: 103,325.
Estimated to go: 21,675.
Reason for stopping: I fly to Seattle tomorrow, it's time to stop.
Music: the Midnight Blue-Light Special playlist, oddly enough.
Lilly and Alice: cat tree and cardboard box, respectively.

I have reached the irritating and fiddly bit of setting things up before blowing them up. I hate this bit. It's difficult and irritating and also, yes, fiddly. I have also reached the fascinating bit where I can literally see the ending, it's right there, and the book will pay off soon. Hopefully it will pay off big time, and then there can be the finest muffins and bagels in the land. Until then, I shall scowl at the keg of victory, and pack my socks for tomorrow's long-distance voyage.

Whee.

Words: 8,232.
Total words: 100,239.
Estimated to go: 24,761.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter eighteen; hit 100,000 words.
Music: the Midnight Blue-Light Special playlist, oddly enough.
Lilly and Alice: cat tree and bed, respectively.

In case you ever wondered, jumping around punching the air and whooping is a much better idea when you're not recovering from a nasty head cold which has turned into a chest cold (complete with horrifyingly unpleasant-sounding cough). I sound like death under normal circumstances right now, and the circumstances following sudden calisthenics were...unusual. On the plus side, I didn't die, and the cats have calmed down, although things were a little touchy here for a few minutes, on account of my choking and their freaking out.

So I am now 100,000 words into Deadline, and have hit the point where it's about to become all boom, all the time. I have some plans in the next week (movies on Friday, the Burns Supper on Saturday), but I expect that by this time in two weeks, I'll be done with the first draft. I'm on-target for my end-of-January goal. That gives me five months, maximum, to go through revisions and redrafts before my editor would really, really like to see proof that I actually wrote a book, rather than, I don't know, going to Disneyworld for the year. And then, Deadline, the book where I put paid to everything. Everything.

This has been exhilarating and terrifying and amazing and a whole bunch of other things. This is my first trilogy, for all that we sold three Toby books in the first contract; it's the first set of stories that are really just all steps along the road to the same story, pieces of a greater whole, and I couldn't be more excited.

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. When will you rise?

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?

Words: 6,064.
Total words: 87,401.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter sixteen.
Music: Girlyman and Glee.
Lilly and Alice: sleeping in my backpack.

As of this evening, I have managed to break three hundred manuscript pages. Exactly. (To be fair, I cheated juuuuuuust a little, and went ahead and wrote the blog post that opens chapter seventeen. Come on, it was that or walk away at two hundred and ninety-nine pages. That's the kind of choice that leads to getting up at three in the morning to start writing again, and that's just no good for anybody.) I'll probably break 90,000 words by the time I get to Seattle, what with that whole "airplane ride" that I have to take to get there. Great Pumpkin bless my Netbook, that's really all I have to say about that.

My page proofs for Feed have been finished and returned to my publisher. I have cover proofs for the US and UK editions of the book; they keep surprising me when I see them out of the corner of my eye, like "Who wrote that? Who's Mira Grant?" followed by "Oh, yeah. I did. That's me." It's like having a secret identity, only instead of being a superhero, she's a total bad-ass horror movie heroine, ready to kick ass and take names (all while having fabulous hair, naturally).

I estimate I have about another 38,000 words to go on this book, give or take a couple of thousand. That's a lot of wordage...but it's a lot of plot. And then I get to revise, and rewrite, and finally stand on the edge of yet another precipice, looking out over the unexplored country of Blackout. I'm almost there.

When will you rise?

Words: 4,297.
Total words: 81,336.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter fifteen.
Music: Moxy Fruvous.
Lilly and Alice: waiting for me to go to bed.

So I finally broke 80,000 words. In a very short period of time, I will break three hundred manuscript pages (the current manuscript paginates to two hundred and seventy-eight pages). Again going by Feed as my benchmark for "this is how long books in this series will trend," I have less than half the book left to go. I'm looking at about 45,000 to 50,000 more words, to say and do and accomplish everything that's left to say and do and accomplish.

Yes, I can do it.

Yes, it's going to hurt.

Yes, I set a very high bar for myself with Feed...but I think I can actually reach that bar again, with this book. Because some of the places it's going are painful as hell, and with something like this, that's a damn good sign.

Now we must rinse.

Words: 6,418.
Total words: 77,039.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter fourteen, time to work on my page proofs.
Music: Eddie From Ohio.
Lilly and Alice: warming my feet.

What does a two hundred page zombie novel do to its author? Anything it wants. I swear, working on this book is like riding a roller coaster with no brakes. The ride operators are evil clowns, and if I sleep, they'll eat me. I get up, go to work, write on the train. Get off work, go home, write on the train. I feel like I'm in a foot race with my own brain. But I really like what's coming out on the other end; it could definitely be worse.

I did the math today, and realized that I'll only have fifty-nine days between the release of A Local Habitation and the release of Feed. That's nowhere near long enough. That's all the time in the world. So in the interests of only going a little crazy during that narrow window, I'm slamming through Blackout as fast as I can without losing my footing, and I'm enjoying every second of this crazy ride.

Plus it's an excuse to contact scientists and ask them horrible questions.

My baby is turning into a real live book, with a real live plot and real live problems, and I couldn't be happier.

Words: 7,217.
Total words: 70,621.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter thirteen. BEHOLD MY PROGRESS!
Music: the Food Network. We all have our process, right?
Lilly and Alice: flanking me here on the couch.

Deadline is now two hundred and forty-four manuscript pages long, which means I'm trucking right along. (Sadly, I'm less excited about potentially hitting three hundred pages than I am about my increasing proximity to 100,000 words. This is because I am a very simple creature in some ways.) I managed to finish one of my favorite action sequences, and now I'm poised to go rocketing into the next stage of the book: blowing more things up. I'm a big, big fan of blowing things up.

Looking at the manuscript for Feed, I'm right around halfway through the first draft. This is a little behind where I'd be if I hadn't been seized with the sudden burning need to finish Discount Armageddon, but a) I'm still on track to finish the first draft by the end of January, assuming I can stick to my daily assigned word counts (without getting sidetracked by another ambush novel), and b) I'm still not sorry, since rather than having two unfinished novels driving me crazy, I now have one unfinished novel driving me crazy, and that leaves me with a lot more sane to aim at the book in question. (The Brightest Fell doesn't count, it exists in its own separate partition of my brain.)

I'm really excited with where this book is going, and not just because there are zombies and lots of lovely excuses to blow things up and talk about viruses and have I mentioned recently that I completely adore this universe? Because I do. I adore this universe. I am the happiest zombie princess.

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

Current stats:

Words: 11,360.
Total words: 101,678.
Reason for stopping: I sort of, well, ran out of book.
Music: the Discount Armageddon play list.
Lilly and Alice: my lap and the orange cat tree, respectively.

First draft stats:

Pages: 353
Chapters: twenty-five, plus a prologue and an epilogue
Started: August 22, 2008
Finished: November 28, 2009

Given how much time this book spent being "lower priority" than things with actual deadlines, fourteen months is a very respectable time to get from beginning to end. Midnight Blue-Light Special should go a lot faster, if only because I completely understand my world now, and what it's supposed to be like. I know the rhythm, I know the beat, and I can dance to it. I am...I'm staggered right now. I've been saying for a few weeks now that I was probably going to finish the book this month, but there's a huge difference between saying and doing. I've done. Draft one is done.

Draft two is going to involve smoothing out the continuity, fixing the pacing, and generally book-doctoring like whoa...but it'll probably be done by the end of January at the very latest, and that's with taking a backseat to Blackout, which gets to take over as my primary book now. Discount Armageddon is done.

I'm amazed and a little off-balance. I am now going to go eat ice cream and watch TV.

Current stats:

Words: 5,017.
Total words: 90,318.
Reason for stopping: in the middle of the big boom in chapter twenty-three. BOOM.
Music: this week's episodes of NCIS and Dexter.
Lilly and Alice: taking up a physically improbable amount of space on my feet.

I...um...yeah. So I have this thing where every day, I put any specific writing goals for the day on my to do list. Because the to do list is my lord and master. Right now, every day, I'm putting "2,000 words, DA" on the list, and every day, I'm checking it off before plowing onward for another few thousand words. Why? Because I have hit the point where I literally can't stop. I eat, sleep, breathe, and dream this book. I inhabit this book even when I'm not working on it. I'm spending half my time (or more) in a fictional reality full of madness and monsters and manic dance numbers breaking out in the middle of nowhere. This is normal for me as I approach the end of a first draft. It really is. But it's been a while since I did this part, and it's making my fingers hurt.

90,000 words means that I'm 15,000 words, give or take, from the end of draft one. I realize I've been hitting that data point a lot, but um, holy crap, end of draft one. This is the book I started on a whim. The book I never lost enthusiasm for, but shelved repeatedly while I worked on things that had actual deadlines. The book that, let's be serious here, kicks off a new series. I needed three of those, right? They're like cats. You're not a crazy cat lady until you have more than four (even if Margaret says that by 2014, mathematics prove that 80% of all books will be written by me).

Also, at my current rate of speed, you won't be getting these updates for all that much longer. So there's that.

Soon, I hope to explain to the people who've only read Toby why, exactly, I felt the need to spend my time in a universe filled with cryptozoologists in skimpy outfits, asbestos blondes, ketchup milkshakes, ballroom dancing, high heeled shoes, and, of course, talking mice. And my answer to them will be, in no uncertain terms...CHEESE AND CAKE!

Current stats:

Words: 7,137.
Total words: 85,301.
Reason for stopping: about midway through chapter twenty-two, totally exhausted.
Music: my evolving Discount Armageddon mix.
Lilly and Alice: asleep in my tank top drawer, being a puddle of blue and white fur.

The speed with which this draft is suddenly materializing is a little scary, and is making me feel faintly hag-ridden. Seriously, there's "my normal writing speed," and then there's "writing to make a deadline," and then there's "holy Great Pumpkin in the sacred patch, where the hell did the day go?" Assuming this book comes out at exactly the estimate, I have fewer than 20,000 words left to go. Second draft will cut ten percent of that. (Actually second draft will cut twenty percent, but half of what I cut will be replaced by clarification, necessary bridgework, and general textual repairs. That's what second draft is for.)

After this draft is done, I have to focus fully on Blackout and The Brightest Fell while my proofreading pool crawls all over the text and rips it into tiny bleeding shreds. (For Christmas this year, I'm getting a bloodbath! Just what I always wanted.) I figure I should have space on the docket to get into Midnight Blue-light Special sometime around May...you know, when I have the Guest of Honor slot and the book coming out. Gosh, it's fun to live inside my head sometimes, in the sense that apparently even I don't think I need to sleep. Sleep is for the weak and sickly, right?

I am so in love with this book right now. I am so in love with this series right now. I am so in love with this world right now, with its reality shows and its cryptid-owned strip clubs and its many, many expeditions into the sewers of Manhattan. I can see where a second draft is going to be absolutely necessary, but right now? Right now, I am just enjoying the hell out of the ride.

I can't wait for you to meet these people.

Current stats:

Words: 5,227.
Total words: 78,264.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter twenty, taking a break before chapter twenty-one.
Music: my Sarah Zellaby mix.
Lilly and Alice: sitting in the bedroom window, raptly watching the kitty cable.

Day by day and word by word, I get closer to the end of the first draft of Discount Armageddon. I'm really excited, and I've hit that point where anything but writing is difficult to maintain for more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I have to take breaks from time to time, but they're just that; breaks between bouts of frantic typing, rather than the things I have to break myself away from. This is awesome. This is especially awesome because I know the way my brain works, and if it's currently this fixated on InCryptid, it's because I'm getting ready for a massive run on another project. Judging by the things that have started creeping around the edges of my mind, I'm going to guess that the "other woman" in this equation is Blackout, the sequel to Feed, which was already on my holiday docket.

This book has been fun and surprising and silly and snappy and a few dozen things I really wasn't expecting when I kicked it off. Better still, it's been the doorway to a brand new series. I need those from time to time. Part of what I love as a writer is the act of creating a world, stepping inside it, and shutting the doors behind me. (This doesn't explain my seeming inability to write completely stand-alone books, but as long as the series keep making sense, I'm not going to whine about it overly much.) I love the things it's forced me to learn in order to write it, and the things I got to just sort of...stumble over. Like some of the freaky things Mother Nature has done in the real world.

25,000 words to go, give or take, and then it's time to make my exit and make my way into other drafts and other disasters. I can barely believe I'm this far along. I can barely believe it's taken me this long.

CHEESE AND CAKE!

Current stats:

Words: 5,183.
Total words: 73,047.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter nineteen (and started chapter twenty).
Music: my Rose Marshall mix.
Lilly and Alice: flopped on the floor, being deeply endearing.

It's weird and a little scary to think about, but I'm about 30,000 words from the end of the first draft of Discount Armageddon. After I finish the first draft, I'll take about six weeks to let my proofreaders argue about commas, another six weeks to finish a second draft, and then...the book is done. The silly, head-smashing, ass-kicking, ballroom dancing, talking mouse extravaganza that kicks off the adventures of the Price family is almost done. I'm speechless. I'm stunned. And I'm deeply delighted, because finishing this book means setting it free for all of you to read.

The thing about living inside my head is that it's very weird in here, and very cluttered. I sometimes liken my writing habits to my television viewing habits; I sometimes change channels and watch something else for a little while, because some days are Masters of Horror days, and others are So You Think You Can Dance days. Both are totally valid, and totally necessary. Working with Verity and the rest of her wacky, wonderful family recharges me when I'm exhausted from other projects, and vice-versa. They all feed into each other.

Soon all the world will understand the glory of the Aeslin mice, the importance of religious ritual, how difficult it is to dance a good tango, and why gorgons hate wigs. But in the meanwhile, I shall continue to be a little stunned at how far I've come from deciding that Verity Alice Price, daughter of Kevin Price and Evelyn Price-Baker, needed a book of her very own.

Current stats:

Words: 7,773.
Total words: 67,864.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter eighteen.
Music: the new mix Merav made for me.
Lilly and Alice: back in California. I miss my kitties.

Discount Armageddon—the first of the InCryptid books, chronicling the adventures of the Price family as they try to study the cryptids of the world without getting eaten by them—is now two hundred and thirty-seven pages long, featuring action, adventure, snarking, and talking pantheistic demon mice with a fondness for religious ritual. It's ballroom dancing as a combat style, it's asbestos blondes and gorgon barmaids, and it's more fun to write than should really be legal. It's also sad, because at this point, I have somewhere between 30,000 and 36,000 words to go, and that doesn't seem like enough.

On the plus side, once I finish this, I get to start digging my teeth into the sequels. And believe me, Midnight Blue-light Special is going to be a hoot and a half, once I get there. And after that...hoo-boy. I really think I like this roller coaster.

What's really interesting is that this is the first series I've started knowing from the starting gate that it was a series, and more, that it was more than just a few books long. Feed was a stand-alone; Rosemary and Rue was an adventure that I didn't quite understand. This time, I know what I'm getting into.

Oddly, I couldn't be happier.

Current stats:

Words: 3,620.
Total words: 60,091.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter sixteen, bedtime.
Music: my soppy love songs and angry punk scramble.
Lilly and Alice: asleep on the bed and begging for attention, respectively.

When last we left our intrepid manuscript, it was four pages shy of two hundred pages (one of my big personal milestones for any book). Well, now it's two hundred and eleven pages in length, complete with the whole of chapter sixteen, which was, um, exciting to work on in so many ways. I love anything that involves Holy Feasts and fried chicken, and this book gives me the opportunity to mix-and-match the two with wild aplomb. Besides which, we are now officially at the high point of that big hill, and it's all bang-bang-boom from here, baby. Bang-bang-boom.

Sadly, while I understand that I'm currently busting pages on this book primarily because my hindbrain is occupied, stegosaurus-like, with the contemplation of the big science questions for Blackout (and this book will hence shortly be tabled again, in favor of things which have current deadlines), I could not be more pleased with how things are going. Oh, there are bits to fix and errors to catch, but on the whole, it's clean, it's quick, and it's just fun, in a way that so very few things are.

CHEESE AND CAKE!

Current stats:

Words: 5,811.
Total words: 56,471.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter fifteen, bedtime.
Music: show tunes and the cats being crazy.
Lilly and Alice: finally exhausted, now that they can't bother me anymore.

I literally stopped just shy of two hundred pages—just shy! I could taste that milestone, dammit—because the chapter was over, and I couldn't bring myself to mess around with my word count just for the sake of a little extra length. Besides, with the book now more than halfway to 60,000 words, we're going to be ringing that particular bell any day now...and yes, I am now past the halfway mark, which is supported by the plot arc, the behavior of the characters, and the place where the chapter breaks. I am giddy.

The best thing about this universe is that it's completely silly in some ways, yet takes itself completely seriously, much like the horror movies of the early 1980s. This is life or death, people, even when the "or death" part of the equation is being represented by hopping, screaming yams (the yams hunger for the taste of human blood). And whenever things get slow, Verity just kicks somebody else in the head, thus speeding them right back up again. I have a fight scene coming up that's going to make me giggle for days. Days.

Life is good.

Words: 6,598.
Total words: 63,304.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter twelve. Time for cold medication.
Music: depressing goth rock.
Lilly and Alice: both sacked out on the bed like plush toys.

Deadline is now two hundred and nineteen manuscript pages long. Can I get a "whoop-whoop" from the audience? Because as milestones go, "breaking two hundred pages" is one of the big, exciting ones. (One hundred pages; 50,000 words; two hundred pages; 100,000 words. You know. The big guns of post-zombie apocalypse manuscript goodness.) Also, I'm into the next internal Book, and I'm approaching one of my favorite set pieces for this volume. So it's been a good next installment, all things considered.

I'm currently shooting for a finished first draft manuscript by the end of January, and am planning to spend a goodly chunk of my holiday trip to Seattle wrestling with my happy little zombie apocalypse. I started—and finished—the first book at Tony's kitchen table; something about being in Seattle just makes me want to work with the Masons on a very deep and detailed level. I don't have a problem with that, especially since the first book, Feed, will be out next May, and it would be good to be hammering on book three before book one is on the shelves. This is the closest to deadline I've ever worked. (Yes, I realize that I still have buckets and acres of time available to me. I also realize that I am very tightly wound where deadlines are concerned.)

The more I work in this universe, the more I fall in love with it, and the happier I become that Newsflesh, unlike the Toby books, is genuinely a trilogy. Because I think these books would break my heart completely if I tried to push them much further than that.

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

Words: 4,416.
Total words: 56,706.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter eleven. Time for horror movies.
Music: oddly enough, lots of show tunes.
Lilly and Alice: lounging.

I sort of hate to stop where I'm stopping, because Deadline is currently one hundred and ninety-six manuscript pages long, and two hundred pages is another of those super-exciting milestones that I so enjoy. Ah, well. I know that I'll be able to hit it in chapter twelve, and I didn't sleep well last night, so my eyes are sort of crossing now. Continuing to work would be counter-productive, and I shall instead conclude my labors in triumph. I like triumph. It tastes of spending the evening watching shitty horror movies and eating tomato sandwiches.

Pacing is always interesting in the Mason books, because I'm combining a very medical thriller/science fiction plot with, well, zombie apocalypse and massive violence. I need to both make sure the "let's talk about droplet-based transmission" scenes don't dominate the book, and also make sure that I'm not writing a Michael Bay movie. (Not that there's anything wrong with Michael Bay. It's just that if I'm going to write a movie, I'd rather write a James Gunn movie, or maybe a John Carpenter movie. One of the good ones. Not Vampires.) It's a very delicate balance, and it sometimes takes me a little while to find my flow in a given chapter. Well, tonight, the flow was on.

Before it sounds like I'm getting too cocky, remember that the final manuscript for Feed came in at 145,000 words, roughly. So I'm only barely a third of the way there. And that's a good thing, because oh...

...you ain't seen nothing yet.

Words: 3,102.
Total words: 52,290.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter ten, I need to sleep.
Music: angry goth rock.
Lilly and Alice: sprawling on my bed like throw rugs.

It's time to get serious about Deadline, which is due at my publisher in June of 2010, and is only about halfway finished. Luckily for me (and for the way I work), eight months is both sufficient time to finish things cleanly, and sufficiently little time to feel like A Real-and-True Deadline, thus causing my good little girl "turn your homework in early" genes to kick all the way in. Ideally, I'll be most of the way clear of this book by Christmas, and be able to spend my holiday break sitting at Tony's kitchen table, doing cleanup and adjustment. Because that's just how we roll around here, yo.

Anyway, this installment marks two major milestones. First, the book is now more than 50,000 words long. Yay! 40,000 may be the point where a novella becomes a novel, but for me, 50,000 words has a strange, iconic power that I simply cannot deny. Second, the three volumes in the Newsflesh trilogy are novels divided internally into books. This installment marks the end of Blackout Book II (Vectors and Victims), and begins Book III (name to be disclosed when I decide which of the possible options it actually is). Feed is four books and a coda. Blackout is either going to be five books and a coda, or Book III is going to be extremely long. I don't know yet, and I'm really excited to find out.

I felt this book come all the way to life tonight. For a zombie novel, that's a good thing. The engine's on, and the car is purring.

Let's see what kind of damage we can do.

Current stats:

Words: 3,674.
Total words: 50,660.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter fourteen.
Music: a lot of angry goth-punk. I'm in a mood.
Lilly and Alice: sprawling atop high things, dozing.

Progress continues! Discount Armageddon has now shattered the 50,000 word mark, which is always a milestone for me, since by that point, I'm so fully committed that it isn't even funny. Also, under my current estimate of length, I'm within 3,000 words—or one more day of really solid writing—from being to the halfway point. That makes me incredibly happy. Since I have three books going right now (by which I mean "three books I'm really actively writing, as opposed to just plinking at"), anything that makes it seem like one of my babies is preparing for bed is just delightful.

Things that this book contains: ballroom dance. Cryptozoology. Snark. Free running. A strip club with a funny name. Mixed drinks. High heels. Snares. Throwing knives. Talking mice. Illegal sub-lets. Coffee shops. Math. Things this book does not contain: vampires. All told, I'm pretty happy with my "have" to "have not" ratio, especially since Verity keeps kicking people in the head.

Life is good.

Current stats:

Words: 4,385.
Total words: 46,986.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter thirteen.
Music: the Counting Crows, mostly. Because that's a shock.
Lilly and Alice: home from the vet and totally healthy. Yay, annual exams.

Apparently, officially becoming a novel was what it took to make me really start busting pages on Discount Armageddon, which has just gained another chapter and nearly 5,000 more words. Said chapter includes snark, combat, snark, sewers, snark, Land of the Lost jokes, snark, ballroom dancing applied to a field situation, and snark. Also, Sarah Zellaby—arguably one of my favorite characters in this series—has finally made her full-scale appearance, and she's just as awesome to write as I've been anticipating.

I'm starting to see the shape of the rest of the book more clearly as I near the halfway point. I now anticipate the full manuscript as coming in somewhere around 102,000 words, for the first pass, and reducing to approximately 99,000 words after I go through and do the obligate clean-and-jerk of all those little unnecessary bits that always creep in during the writing process. What's more fun is that I'm starting to see the shape of the series more clearly at the same time, and this is never not going to be fun to write.

Especially if Verity keeps kicking people in the head.

Current stats:

Words: 3,972.
Total words: 42,601.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter twelve.
Music: a lot of university competition acapella and stuff from Glee.
Lilly and Alice: sleeping peacefully, because they are cats, and hence evil.

YES! YES! WE ARE NOW OFFICIALLY A NOVEL! SUCK IT, SHORT FORM!!!!!

Ahem. Sorry about that. Anyway, with this installment, Discount Armageddon officially crosses the 40,000 word mark, moving solidly into "novel" territory. My little baby book is all grown up! It's been a slower process than is normal for me, largely because it's managed to collide with so many rewrites and deadlines for other projects, but it's finally there; it's finally an actual novel. Because it's awesome.

I'm now through chapter twelve. The plot is on the table, the major players are all solidly in place, and I've had the opportunity to get geeky about several really horrific cryptid races, along with the little scraps of trivia that always make me so happy. (Nothing is more fun than going "but we don't need that, we're not on the jackalope migration routes here" in the middle of an otherwise unrelated statement.) The manuscript has passed the hundred and fifty page mark, and the end is finally in sight. Very, very far ahead, but still, in sight.

Words: 4,229.
Total words: 49,188.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter nine, time for Eureka.
Music: random shuffle, lots of Counting Crows.
Lilly and Alice: I'm really not sure, which makes me nervous.

I'm finally back to work on Blackout, which has been patiently waiting for me to finish with those silly fairies and come back to my beloved zombie apocalypse. Don't worry, baby, I didn't forget about you, I just needed to finish mopping up the release debris from Rosemary and Rue before I could pay the proper attention. Hopefully, tonight's dose of sweet love and mad virology has convinced you that my affections are still true.

I sort of wanted to keep going until I hit fifty thousand words, but the fact of the matter is, chapter nine is over, and chapter nine ends exactly when and where it needs to end. Anything more would just be word count for word count's sake, and that's not fair to anyone. Besides, my characters would kill me if I forced them to keep going right now.

I love my zombie distopia. I love the Masons. And I love Kellis-Amberlee.

I feel so good about this book right now.

Words: 11,897
Total words: 23,633.
Reason for stopping: I'm at the end of chapter six, and it's time for bed. Also, not all 11k was done in one sitting.
Music: last week's episode of Mental.
Lilly and Alice: licking my elbow, and parts unknown, respectively.

So I am now six chapters into the process of yanking the existing text of book five—foolishly written before the final revision of book four—into line with the finalized continuity. It's definitely weird to be deeply involved with the fifth book in a series when everyone else is just starting to get into the first one. I would say "never again," but I've met me, so that would just be asking for trouble.

Anyway, The Brightest Fell is a lot of fun, and I'm hoping its existence reassures people who are just now finding out I exist that no, really, I plan to stick with this series until it's finished. (Also that this really isn't a trilogy. Trilogies are great. I'm writing a trilogy. But trilogies come with certain literary conventions that aren't honored by A Local Habitation, so the more I can convince people that it's "book two," not "the middle book," the better.)

I make progress! I dance the dance of joy. And now I sleep.

Current stats:

Words: 4,051.
Total words: 38,629.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter eleven.
Music: mostly the Counting Crows and random selections from Verity's playlist.
Lilly and Alice: really interested in the bedroom window.

Well, we're still a novella by SWFA rules, since we're still shy of that magical 40,000 word mark...but we're getting closer every step of the way, and best of all, I don't feel like any of it is padding. Yes, I'll probably lose the standard 10% in the final revisions, but right now, everything that's in the text is there because it needs to be there. It's got a good beat, and you can dance to it.

Welcome to chapter eleven, where Verity and Dominic meet more of the family, Sarah is creepy, and I get to go more in-depth on the cuckoos, aka "my favorite horribly creepy and upsetting cryptid race (now with bonus central characters)." I love it when my creepy is actually integral, rather than being sort of like parasitic mistletoe: interesting to look at, gradually killing the tree. But dude, it's up to a hundred and thirty-seven pages of gooey cryptid goodness, and I am a happy, happy girl.

Words: 3,671.
Total words: 11,736.
Reason for stopping: I'm at the end of chapter three, and I'm out of go.
Music: the random shuffle of my entire music library.
Lilly and Alice: eating and chasing invisible bugs, respectively.

Yanking the existing text of book five (foolishly written before the final revision of book four) into line with the finalized continuity is providing to be surprisingly easy, probably because I'm currently sunk so neck-deep in Toby's universe that I could place her Starbucks order. I don't even like coffee all that much! (Tomorrow's to-do list includes 3,000 words on Blackout. Whiplash is fun!)

The Brightest Fell is a book that I've been wanting the opportunity to do right by for a long time. I love this story, I love this period in Toby's life, and I'm really excited to finally be tackling it with my eyes open and my skills honed to the task at hand. This doesn't change the part where I'm going to be swearing my ass off in another 20,000 words, or the fact that Discount Armageddon is going to be finished purely to keep me from punching Toby in the face, but right now? Right now, I'm ecstatic.

Whee!

Words: 8,165.
Total words: 8,165.
Reason for stopping: have reached the end of chapter two.
Music: the random shuffle and my Toby play list.
Lilly and Alice: asleep on my bed and God-knows where, respectively.

How do I celebrate finishing with the fourth Toby Daye book and never needing to look at it again (except for reference purposes, and editorial, and oh, yeah, when I inevitably reread it to keep the events fresh in my head)? By starting to revise book five to bring it into line with the changes in the continuity, of course! Because that is the insane way in which my crazy little blonde brain works.

I'm doing the word counts based on the rewritten text, rather than the total existing text, because I honestly have no idea how much of this book is going to be pitched out my bedroom window over the course of the next few months. Still, eight thousand words is nothing to sneeze at, and it's definitely something to start with.

Whee!

Current stats:

Words: 3,562.
Total words: 34,578.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter ten.
Music: Sand Serpents, a Science Fiction Channel Original Movie of insane badness.
Lilly and Alice: bedroom floor and bed, respectively.

It seems that "I will sit down for a few minutes and clear my head by producing a few hundred words of InCryptid goodness" is another way of saying "I will spend three hours knocking out all of chapter ten, now with added al-Nahl goodness." (Thanks to Sunil, by the way, for being insanely good about random requests for the loan of his character naming powers.) But oh, that was fun, and oh, it's good to spend some time with Verity, however accidentally.

Blackout only made the transition from "novella" to "novel" earlier today, and now Discount Armageddon is inching up on that same beautiful benchmark. Which is a good thing, because if I can't finish one little novel, I don't know what I'm going to do about all those sequels...

Words: 4,937.
Total words: 44,959.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter eight finally accomplished.
Music: random shuffle and the book-specific playlist.
Lilly and Alice: on the bed, lazing about at an Olympic level.

Well, after another unplanned hiatus (this time sponsored entirely by the fourth Toby Daye book), a series sale (the Masons are coming to a bookstore near you!), and a name change (welcome to Blackout, formerly known as The Mourning Edition), I've managed to pass two fairly serious, fairly scary milestones.

Milestone #1: Chapter eight is finished, which means that things are about to start getting a lot more hectic and unsettling for my poor protagonists. Also, if this book follows the pattern set by the first one, this means I am close to a quarter of the way through the book. That's a pretty big deal.

Milestone #2: According to the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Nebula rules, something is a novella right up until it hits 40,000 words and becomes a novel. By that definition, Blackout has ticked fully over into "novel" territory. Oh, it's a really short novel at the moment, and it doesn't actually have a complete plot...but it's a novel, not a novella, and it's just gaining steam from here. This is a book that's going places. Dark, scary, unsettling places. Luckily, the book has a chainsaw.

I am so excited, I can't even say.

Behold! For now I wear the human pants! Earlier this evening, I finished doing the redline edits on the physical manuscript of Late Eclipses, finished entering those edits into my manuscript copy, and finished processing the corrections in Vixy's gloriously detailed machete file. Then I kissed it goodnight, told it to wear its jacket, and shipped it off to The Agent once again. Ha.

The current book stats:

Pages, 400.
Words, 106,830.
Chapters, thirty-seven.
Cans of DDP, beyond counting.

So basically the book gained two chapters and lost a thousand words. It also gained a lot of awesome, which is good, because otherwise, it might have gained a date with a wood-chipper. I am very, very ready to be working on The Brightest Fell, aka, "Toby Daye, book five," aka, "Seanan, honey, can we please wait for Rosemary and Rue to come out before you finish the second set of three?" But dude, it's been waiting so patiently, and I've been neglecting it for so long. Book five needs love!

In conclusion...

...DINO DANCE PARTY!

Current stats:

Words: 4,506.
Total words: 31,016.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter nine.
Music: the DVR's kind presentation of the first part of the So You Think You Can Dance
Lilly and Alice: sprawled on the floor.

So it turns out that what I thought was the end of chapter nine wasn't actually the end of chapter nine. What I just wrote, that was the end of chapter nine. All that other stuff is in chapter nine, too; it's just a longer chapter than originally believed.

In other news, Verity is presently stark-ass naked.

I love this book.

10. Betsy -- aka "the breeder from whom I am purchasing my new Maine Coon" -- emailed me last night to get the last of the information she needs to fill out Alice's health certificate. (The airlines require you to have a health certificate for any animal you wish to carry onto a plane; something about not really wanting to deal with a rabies outbreak at thirty thousand feet. This just shows that they don't want me to have any fun.) So it's officially official, and I'll be bringing home my new baby girl this weekend. Perhaps then Lilly will allow me to sleep through the night. Unlikely, but a girl can dream, right?

9. The word counts have been missing lately because I've been continuing to hammer on the reboot to Late Eclipses, trying to yank the book into alignment with the awesome I know it truly has the potential to be. I'm about a quarter of the way through the text at this point, and things really are becoming visibly more and more awesome. We haven't reached the point in the revisions process where I can no longer make fair and measured assessments of quality, and that's good.

8. People everywhere are getting their copies of Ravens In the Library, and while I haven't seen any full-length critical reviews, I'm generally seeing positive reactions to the book itself. (I am, of course, primarily interested in seeing the book do well, because it's for an excellent cause, and in being my usual neurotic little blonde self about reactions to my story. But at least I'm up-front about it, which makes it a little less crazy-making.) Remember, the book will only be available until Sooj's medical bills are fully covered.

7. I have registered for World Fantasy, booked my hotel room for San Diego, applied for professional membership to San Diego, and arranged for hotel space in Montreal. I am, in short, basically done with my convention arrangements between now and August. (BayCon is local enough to require little pre-planning on my part, while Duckon is taking care of all the arrangements for me, on account of I'm one of their guests. It's nice.) I'm always happier when I know that things have been set up as far in advance as humanly possible.

6. Zombies are still love.

5. In the last several weeks, my website has gone from "idle" to "awesome," with almost all our functionality now up and online. The only things still pending are the forums and the mailing list, and both these are being held up by issues on the server side, which we're working to resolve. (Getting the forums up and functional now gives my mods time to try to break them before I'm banned from that part of the site nigh-completely. Planning ahead. It's what's for dinner.)

4. While I'm still not sleeping nearly enough, thank you Lilly, I feel somewhat less like a corpse today than I did yesterday, probably at least in part because I forced myself to go to bed immediately after Big Bang Theory last night. Nothing says "a good night's sleep" like adorable physics geeks and inking before turning in. Although losing my pencil for half the episode really didn't help.

3. I have seriously not read a book that was anything short of awesome in the past week. They were YA and adult, mainstream, fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and all made of pure, unadulterated awesome. If all books were as good as the ones I've been reading, the bar would be set so high we'd need a telescope to see it. I couldn't be happier with my recent reading choices. I really couldn't.

2. In two days, I go to Seattle. In three days, I see my Vixy. In four days, I see Kitten Sundae live and in concert. And in five days, I get to take Alice home with me, thus ruining everything, in the nicest way. (Obligatory Jonathan Coulton reference for the quarter!)

...and the number one good thing about today...

1. My life is so wonderful right now. I'm tired, I'm grumpy, and I'm inclined to smack anyone who pokes me with a stick, but at the end of the day, even I can't pretend that my life isn't amazing. Rosemary and Rue is well on its way to publication, and according to Amazon, 90% of the people who visit the page are buying the book. Lilly and Alice are both healthy. My back is behaving itself remarkably well, and spring is springing up all around me, making my normal walking habits much less crazy. I have the best friends in the world -- everyone should have the best friends in the world, because it makes everything better -- and I own more bad horror movies than I could watch in a lifetime. The world is wonderful.

I think we're gonna be all right. So what's new and awesome in the world of you?

Current stats:

Words: 6,075.
Total words: 30,086.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter eight.
Music: my ass-kicking Verity dance music play list.
Lilly: dead to the world.

Behold! For now I wear the human pants! Cryptid pants. Whatever. Now with extra ballroom dance, thanks to subject-matter expert Betsy Tinney.

I love my creepy cryptozoologists so hard.

Words: 5,372.
Total words: 39,995.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter seven, head is spinning.
Music: random shuffle and the book-specific playlist.
Lilly: not entirely sure, which is a little worrisome.

After an unplanned hiatus sponsored entirely by the Toby Daye series, chapter seven of The Mourning Edition is finally finished. Take that, zombies! Take that, journalists! Take that, actual structured narrative! This was very soothing, once I managed to get back into the swing of things. I've been editing so much in 2009 that I've been doing very little 'new' writing, so it was nice to just spend a day chasing people with the living dead.

Like any good zombie adventure, The Mourning Edition occasionally has to slow down and take a deep breath before charging into the next glorious Guignol on the docket. This was one of the slower chapters, and while those can often be the most difficult to write -- oddly, it's easier to blow stuff up than it is to tell a story; perhaps this explains most summer blockbusters -- they're also the most gratifying to finish. I always feel like I've really moved things along with these pieces.

According to the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Nebula rules, something is a novella right up until it hits 40,000 words and becomes a novel. By that definition, The Mourning Edition is about fifty-five words from leveling up again. I'm not going to mess with it tonight, however. I know when it's time to shut down and watch some Tales From the Darkside to celebrate.

We done good.