Wearing Away My Fingers

That was one hell of a way to finish 2012. Let me go count my fingers (and thumbs) to make sure they’re still there.

Remember how I figured I’d get 5k or so done yesterday? I was wrong, as I always am when I try to predict how much I’ll write. Dear sweet kittens, was I wrong.

How wrong? I have a new record. But before we get to that, I’d like to say that Cayle might be exceeding Devan in terms of being cooperative. That a) takes serious work and b) is a nice change from how he was at the beginning of writing Unmasked. But I think I understand what isn’t quite right at the beginning. I’ve made notes about that, since it’ll be a month or two before I get to edit this beast.

And now, back to our total. As of when I forced myself to stop last night (yes, I really did have to force me to stop), Unmasked is 68,311 words long. I had to go back and check what the last update on the total was that I’d given. That was on December 27th, and I was at 34,111. I’ve slightly more than doubled this book’s length in 4 days. I mean, it makes sense, looking at the daily totals since then, but, um, DAMN. I think I’m just going to sit here for a minute and be impressed with myself for once.

Right, I was talking about a record, wasn’t I? I broke my old, one day word count record last night. Wasn’t expecting that, to tell you the truth, since I got off to a slightly slow start. The new record is 8,101 words. Yes, I wrote over 8k yesterday. And that was after two straight days over 7k each. And yet my brain seems to still be intact, not to mention ready to keep going today. I mean, I was ready to write all the way through the night last night, but I thought sleep might be a good idea. Wow. Um, moving along before my brain melts at the idea of having typed that much…

What’s scariest (to me at least) about the overall length is how far I still have to go. Regular readers of this blog will know how bad I am at predicting the length of my books while writing the first draft. Even with an outline, I just can’t seem to get it down. That said, based on a conservative view of how this has gone so far and how much outline I still have to get through, I think I have another 50-55k to go on this novel. That’s right, I’m now expecting Unmasked to clock in around 120k+ words. And, if that isn’t insane enough, I think the other books in the Masques quartet may well be longer than Unmasked. Why? Because I’m looking at how much I have going on in the very, very high level outline I made of each book and I’m pretty sure I have more of everything happening in each of them than I had in this book. Um, that’s a frightening concept.

The amount I still have to go, along with how well it’s going and how much I’m loving the way this story is unfolding, makes me wish this wasn’t the last day of my vacation. I wish I had another week or two off to just wrap myself in this book. Hell, at this rate, another week of this would see me finished. As it is, I suspect that two more weeks is all I’ll need. Yes, that takes me over my 30 days, and I don’t care. It’s going well, it’s longer than usual and I struggled a fair bit in the beginning. More than anything else though, I’m happy with where I am now. Besides, I’m fairly sure I won’t be much beyond those 30 days, not at this rate, not even with having to go back to the day job.

Meanwhile, in the background of all this, my fallen angel, Saul, whispers. He’s been sharing secrets lately, especially since I found the song that seems to evoke him. Why do I get the feeling that this one’s going to be impatient? He’ll have to learn to wait, because I’m not going to get serious about him until I’m finished the entire Masques quartet. We’ll see where things stand then. But oh, they are sweet secrets.

~ by Julie on January 1, 2013.