(I promise I won’t be so spammy with the book reports tomorrow.)

In other news — eighty thousand words! Astute observers will notice it’s been over two weeks since I announced the 70K mark. My two-day respite, during which I got two flashbacks written, turned out to be longer than intended, and then I missed another two days while traveling. That seems to be the pattern of this book, which is unlike any other book I’ve written: rather than my usual slow-and-steady pace, I’ve been hitting periodic droughts, then pushing rather faster than usual to make up the difference. I wrote 5K in the two days after getting back from Minneapolis, and my intent is to make 1500 every day between now and the end of the book. Mostly because that’s what I have to do in order to make my deadline while still leaving a margin for safety. And on top of that, I’m officially starting the revision before I finish the book, because this novel — again, unlike any other — is requiring me to rip out whole scenes, not just at the beginning, where I was faffing around without quite knowing what I was doing yet, but throughout. I’ve got two thousand words of utter crap in Part Four that accomplishes little more than introducing Irrith to a character Galen’s already met, which needs to be replaced with something more exciting.

(Like breaking into the newly-created British Museum to steal some artifacts. What? The place doesn’t open for business until early 1759, by which point I think my characters will be too occupied to work it into the plot, so theft it is.)

Anyway, yes, this has me a little stressed, because 1500 is kind of firmly fixed in my mind as a pace I can only keep up if I know pretty well where my plot is going, and that isn’t quite as true as I’d like it to be. I fear I might end up with more faffy scenes that will need replacing. Other people work that way and are fine, but it’s a new model for me, and not one I particularly like.

If it produces a good book, though, that’s all I really care about.

Word count: 80,003
LBR census: I’ve concluded that Midnight was the love-and-blood book, and Ashes was the blood-and-rhetoric book, which leaves this one to be the love-and-rhetoric book. But, true to the icon, I will have blood by the end.
Authorial sadism: It’s one of the laws of narrative that nothing good will happen on Friday the 13th. At least in an English faerie story. (Though apparently there’s no evidence for that superstition prior to the nineteenth century.)