7,932 words since June 1st, at a little over 1K every day. It’s a good start, and I’m on track to have 10K before I go driving off to California with kniedzw. Whether I get anything written on the road will be anyone’s guess; I can write while traveling just fine, but I can’t exactly take my research library with me in the car. Even if it’s a total wash, though, I’ll have 23K this month, and that’s fine.

I suppose now’s as good a time as any to outline the structure for this book. There are four days of the Fire, which I intend to scatter throughout the book. (Basically, this one will have four big flash-forwards instead of the ten flashbacks of MNC.) That means the rest of the story leading up to the Fire will also be in four parts. I’m aiming to have each part be roughly 20K, with roughly 5K for each Fire day, and the book is due at the beginning of October. Ergo, 25K each month will give me a completed draft in time (though without time for revision). That’s my baseline, the minimum I need to do. It isn’t precisely one part + one day every month, though, because I really need to save the Fire days until I’ve written everything that leads up to them; they’ll be written last. (However much I dearly want to get to Jack, and see how he works on the page.)

Progress so far: Antony is starting to find his own personality instead of borrowing Philip’s, which is good, because Philip would not make a good protagonist for this novel. Ben Hipley has randomly re-invented himself out of the NPC cast for Memento; I’m not sure why, but hey, sure. I can have a totally different character with the same name, if that’s what he really wants. The Short Parliament is about to start, which is very nearly the same thing as saying the Short Parliament is about to end. (Hence the name.) I, er, ought to read about that before I write those scenes.

The story is developing in my head at a very slow and deliberate pace, but that’s okay. Slow and steady wins the race.

LBR quota: except for that death in the first day of writing, it’s been all rhetoric. Which is fine. I think I can make it exciting enough. And if I can’t, well, I’m going to be Blowing Shit Up (by which I mean London) every 20K words, so there will be regular injections of Spectacle! and Excitement!
Authorial sadism: Sending Humphrey Taylor to the colonies because the protagonists are too soft to kill him themselves.