After yet more whinging and moaning and telling myself I earned a break with yesterday’s work, I made myself put my butt in the chair and start typing . . . and two thousand words later, I have hit the mighty 80K mark, which is the point at which this starts to feel like a Real Book to me.

Of course, this isn’t the Onyx Court: I’m aiming for 90K total, rather than the nearly 160K that With Fate Conspire ended up clocking. So that particular boundary lies quite close to the Finished Book line right now. I still have various things that need fixing — in fact, I’ve been revising as I go for a while, settling the characters who kept changing their names, putting guns on mantelpieces after I realized I needed to fire them somewhere in the 70K stretch, etc — but I’m going to arrive at the end of this month with a passably decent draft, I think.

And that, my friends, is victory.

Edited to add — bonus (spoiler-redacted) quote, to celebrate my achievement, and the fact that two finished copies of A Natural History of Dragons showed up today:

This is how I marched out of [place] toward [place] with what, at first glance, might understandably be mistaken for a small invading army.

Fortunately, the confusion was resolved before anyone fired upon us.

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