We’re more than sixty thousand words into the book. I commented to Alyc that by this stage I’ve usually had some days where I’m all, “ugh, I don’t want to write; the story is so boring” — non-writers think the job must be fun every day, but the truth is that it isn’t. Sometimes it’s a slog, even though the story turns out well. But here? I have yet to have a day like that. There’s been a few where getting started was hard or things didn’t feel entirely lively, but none where forward progress felt like pulling teeth. And we’re excited enough for the next several chapters that it’s unlikely to come any time soon.

Mind you, that effect normally hits somewhere after the halfway point in the book. Since this one might be as much as 200K, maybe we just haven’t gotten far enough in to reach the slog stretch. Alternatively, normally it takes me about two months to get this far — not less than a month and a half — so maybe in a few weeks the momentum will start to flag. I’m trying to bear in mind that we may hit some periods where the work feels a lot harder, and that’s okay; it happens with every book, and doesn’t mean there’s a serious problem here.

So far, though, there’s no problem at all. We’re working at well over the (conservative) pace we set for ourselves, and if it weren’t for Worldcon in the way, it would look like full steam ahead for the next several weeks.

Word count: ~64000
Authorial sadism: It’s never a good sign when you coordinate the next scene by saying “you remember what it looked like on Supernatural when [spoiler] happened?” (My sister has been reading each chapter as we finish them. We apologized to her ahead of time for that scene.)
Authorial amusement: We saw an opportunity to get G— with his shirt off, and took it. 😀
BLR quotient: Well, we killed one character, accused another of child slavery, set somebody up for heartbreak, and started dropping hints of oncoming disaster. I think this one gets filed under “blood.” (Shirtlessness and intermittent flirting notwithstanding.)