I have to admit, the strain is starting to set in. Not badly so; I’ve written books where I felt completely burned out at one or more points along the way, and I’m not that tired yet. But Alyc and I have written 174K in fifteen weeks — more than 11K per week. Closer to 12. Even for shared work, that’s a lot, and especially so when it’s sustained for such a long period of time.

Especially since I’ve been editing as I go. I’ve done this in the past with other novels — usually when I have a deadline breathing down my neck and need to make sure I’ve got a workable draft very soon after I have a draft at all — and even though revision doesn’t take it out of me the same way drafting does, I think the lack of downtime from thinking about the story starts to get to me. Writing a novel is an endurance sport to begin with, and writing + revising is even more so.

Mind you, I have only myself to blame. No egging on was required to make me sign up for the escalations of “why do only 5K a week when we could do a whole chapter?” and “why do only one chapter when we could do two?” And I don’t actually have to be revising as we go. I’m doing it because I’m so excited about this book that I’m impatient to see it out in the world, and since I can’t do anything to make the submissions process go faster, the only way I can hurry it along is to get the draft ready as soon as possible. All wounds here are self-inflicted. 😛

Fortunately, the end really is in sight. We’ve got four chapters left, but as of this post going live, we’ve already started on 21. We’ll finish that this week, give ourselves a short break, and then it’s a pretty straight run through to the finish line. We may collapse on the other side in a pile of exhaustion, but we’ll have set ourselves a new record in the process!

Word count: ~174,000
Authorial sadism: Putting G— in a conflicted position all chapter long, then making him dig his heart out and present it for someone else’s inspection before they’ll listen to him.
Authorial amusement: “Aren’t you afraid of drowning?” “Only in the metaphorical sense.”
BLR quotient: When blood and rhetoric have a baby, we call that a riot.