Done at 100,500 words, which is what, 8.5K more? By “done” I of course mean “…with the first draft,” which means that, once I’ve given the manuscript a couple weeks to cool off, I get to do all kinds of revising and rewriting. I’m not complaining. That process is just as fun and awful as writing the first draft, but in a completely different way. I think it’s very necessary for novels, too. With a short story, you can often hold the whole concept in your head at once, translate it to the page, and find that, barring a bit of line-editing, you’ve more or less recreated that vision.

At 5000 words, give or take 2.5K, a short story is 5% as long as this book. There are going to be things I didn’t account for and need expansion, and things that felt promising as I wrote them but ended up going nowhere and need extraction. Taking care of both these things makes a book much, much stronger.

Think I’m done with progress reports for now, though, mostly because I’ve discovered they’re boring as shit. Bye!

11K words; 93K total. No disruptions put me off pace, it was just harder. I had consistent output every day I sat down, but instead of finishing an all-day session with 4200 or 3500, I’d end up at 2400; instead of 2.5K on my short days, I was lucky to see 2K. I’ll probably see my total drop even more next week.

Why? Because I’m currently about a third of the way through the final chapter, bitches. I won’t be popping the champagne (or, more accurately, cracking the Smirnoff) just then, though. Well actually I will, tonight and tomorrow, but that will be for general-purpose drinking, not celebratory inebriation.

Point is, after the final chapter wraps up, I’ve got to go back and thread a reworked short story as interstitial material between chapters. Long-time me-fans–hi, Mom–will recognize it as “All Man’s Children,” my first short story I ever sold. Gonna be a little trickier than cutting and pasting, though. As my first real attempt at some structural experimentation within a novel, I’m looking forward to the challenge and hopefully learning a new trick.

17K more words as of last night, bringing it up to 82K total. Best week yet word count-wise, but at least one significant chapter felt underdeveloped, and may need serious expansion and revision once the draft is done.

I’m actually sitting at 83K right now with about two and a half chapters to go and plans for an interstitial story. I’m guessing the first draft will end up somewhere between 95-98K words. A little under my final estimate, but that’s good: I find I tend to expand my word count in revisions, focusing on characterization, setting, and world details that puff up my final count. My first draft should leave me with 5-10K words to play with as I expand the second draft before the manuscript starts getting beyond agentorial comfort zones.

After that, I’m thinking my third draft should be about cutting every excess word I can. Having done this with several short stories, I’ve found I can trim anywhere from 5-10% without compromising the story in any meaningful way.

This process, ideally, will leave me with a manuscript that’s got everything it needs and leaves out everything it doesn’t. Revisions are a bitch, but I’m looking forward to seeing how I do with this new approach.

Thanks to con-going wiping out my last Friday and Saturday, I’m sitting at 65K words as of today, or 8.5K new ones over the last week. Or should I say the last “weak” because that shit is so measly it probably never had its MMR shot.

Did finish another Aether Age submission. That took an additional 1.5K, so if you look at my combined fiction output, I’m back up in quintuple digits. Booyah.

P.S. May change title to The Starlight Rebellion. Something more badass, anyway. One piece of con advice I’m trying to make practice is that a work sells itself from the title on down. Say you’ve got two books in front of you, The Key and The Hyperactive Adventures of Dog-Man on the Planet of the Invisible Bras. That “key” is probably some deep metaphor, but whatever door it opens, you can bet there aren’t any tits behind it.

Another 16K words this last week puts me up at 56.5K total. Good times, considering the middle of a novel is the most troublesome and bastardly segment. I don’t expect anything near that word count this time next week–RadCon ate up all my writing time today, and will cripple it tomorrow, even though I’m skipping out on the middle of the day to squeeze in a few hours on it before heading back for another series of author panels–but I ought to be up around the two-thirds mark, after which the logical course of the remaining story will be relatively easy. By which I mean it will regress from being as painful as five bitches on a bitch boat to two or possibly three.

Ellen Datlow, by the way, is a cool character. She shrugs off networking con people with an honesty that’s blunt but not impolite. When asked, as an audience member in a panel on taboos, whether she had any, she replied “As an editor? .. Bad writing.”

Between that panel and a later live interview by Eileen Gunn, I’ve got a clearer picture of how a lot of the big anthologies work–hers, anyway, but presumably she’s not alone–by request, mostly, once they already know your name. How do they see your name? By working with you before, obviously enough, but also by having your name out there. She reads Interzone, I know that much.

Still trying to figure out how much appearing in smaller zines affects anything. I meant to ask her take on that, but I’m crippled by some character trait (polite deference or over-meekness, depending on your values) which means I normally don’t ask my obviously brilliant questions. Those omnipresent rambling con-goers who don’t even know why they opened their mouths in the first place have to be heard, after all.