A weekly progress report as I work through the editing of my current fantasy novel.
This one is out a day late only because we lost Internet access last night due to some icy weather and, as I type this, it still hasn't come back on. (Update: It just back on a little while ago, so about 24 hours w/out connectivity.) "Frozen junction boxes" they tell me. In any case, here's this week's writing update.
Overall, I'm up 19 pages for the week. Not quite the 20 pages I like to get, but close enough. 14 of those came from forward progress, 5 from a reduction in page count. It's all part of the editing process. That puts me at a total page count of 363 (down from last week's 368) and a current page of 99 (up from last week's 85).
Here's the pages edited vs. pages remaining graph:
Percent complete is up from 23.1% to 27.3%:
Word count, which I continue to think is the most interesting statistic, went down again, from last week's 107,872 to 106,591:
I'm well below the 110,000 words I wanted to get under at this point. Even with the additional material I plan to add back in (to give one character in particular a bit more of the story) I don't think I'll go much over that word count. Also, if this trend continues, I might even approach 100,000 words by the time I'm done. I kind of hope not. Originally, this novel stood at 135,000 words. I can't help but feel I wasted a lot of time chugging out that 20,000 or so words only to have it cut. I think about 5-6,000 of that reduction came about simply because I chopped out one whole character from the narrative. But the rest was plain and simple editing: killing darlings and tightening up the prose. I suppose it's an inevitable part of the writing process. You can plan, but you can't plan every word, sentence, or paragraph.
Until next week.