What It Will Take

32,290 / 50,000 (64.6%)

New words: 2288

Current deficit: 4384 Coming back down again!

Working conditions: After hours of percoset sleep, after dinner, after watching House, after dicking around on the internet for way too long, after the spouse went to bed, I finally sat down to write. Every minute, my first thought was, "I'm really tired," and my second thought was, "What cool thing could happen next in the story?" Should have put the writing first before something.

Notable story incidents: Nonetheless, some cool things did happen in the story. I backtracked to Chapter 5, the one in which the shapeshifter spies come in their buzzard forms to examine Stisele while she's knocked flat on the battlefield. Next thing I knew, Stisele was recovered enough to be present while Trebin and his Miaaran opposite number negotiate about who can use which bits of terrain for funerary rites. There's conflict, sure, but I haven't yet figured out what there is for Stisele to do in this scene other than witness it so the reader can find out about it. Sometimes having just one viewpoint character is a pain in the ass. If I could pick whichever character from the cast had the most to do in a given scene, and narrate from that head for the length of a short chapter, the draggy bits would be less draggy. But no. In the interest of eventual marketability, if Stisele doesn't see it happen, it's nothing but hearsay.

This book will be short enough to sell. Dammit.

But first, it has to get longer for a while. What it will take to get to the 50K mark by the 30th: I will have to average 2250 words/day. That's not impossible. It's not even all that improbable.