The State of the Novel - December, 2009

Wow! It's been a long month... or rather, thirteen months, since I did my last State of the Novel post. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to pretend that the last month of writing was contiguous.

That being the case, I had a very productive month, at 58,248 words. That's more than in my first month, and I'd like to do the same with December, but because of the holidays, that's just not going to work out.

So instead, I'm proposing to do 19 days of writing in December, plus a bonus day at some point thereafter. That's a total of 33,780 words. If I stick to the letter, will put me around 147,000 words; more than likely, I'll hit the 150k mark around December 17th or 18th.

How much text is that? Well, if I look at the first book, that's about eleven chapters of text, at my usual chapter length. It took Bryony all the way from her appearance out in the snow, to her conversation with Jorik about her reading ability. As for how much further those 34k words will take me this time, I really don't know. I haven't been awfully good lately at predicting how quickly I'll get to certain things--after all, Chapters 7 and 8 were originally supposed to be just one scene, and now I'm wondering if it will bleed over into Chapter 9. The answer is looking like a yes.

The important part is that I'm making progress. This isn't a race where I know how many miles there are to run. But it is a race where I know the finish line, and whatever path I take to get there, I intend to finish.