Midnight Never Come is complete, at 112,266 words.

I was right.

There weren’t any good stopping points between the start of the explosions and the end of them.

6299 words later, all I’ve got left in Act Five is the denoument. Plus — as before — two dreams, two flashbacks, and an epilogue.

You’d think I would take tomorrow off, but you would be wrong.

Authorial sadism: You know what? There wasn’t any. Which isn’t to say nobody suffered. But no sadism.

LBR quota: As the icon says — concurrent.

Edited to add: BTW, cancel that thunderstorm. I don’t need it anymore.

Bunch of landmarks tonight.

The numerical one is 100K. Ladies and gents, we’re into six digits, and the explosions are truly beginning.

One of tonight’s scenes involved Deven being a righteous ass. Another one is of a sort where, to really prepare and get it right, I would have to go get a Ph.D in Renaissance theology. (And probably another one in Renaissance occultism.) Instead, I speed-read Frances Yates, and yes, that’s exactly as bad of an idea as those of you who recognize that name think it is. My brain nearly melted.

The third scene is the one I’ve been looking forward to since I sat in a cafe down the street from the British Museum, with my shoes wet and my hot chocolate getting cold, and wrote a line in my notes that had me giggling for days afterward. Yes, we finally got there, and it amuses me just as much today as it did two months ago.

I have two Tiresias scenes, two flashbacks, about half of Act Five, and an epilogue to go. (Yes, this book needs an epilogue. Also a prologue. Trust me.)

I’m saying “yes” a lot in this post.

It’s a downhill charge from here to the end.

Authorial sadism: For once, it was all the minor spear-carrying characters I was the meanest to, instead of the main ones. I like to mix things up a bit, don’t you know.

LBR quota: Love. No, really. I promise.

. . . okay, I admit, there’s a whole lotta blood just on the other side of the horizon, and the love is going to bring it down.

My resolution of this morning has led to rank stupidity, of a probably necessary sort.

I had one scene left in Act Four. In keeping with the need for a higher pace, my goal for the night was not one thousand words, but that scene. I wasn’t sure how much that would be.

2169, in case you were wondering.

But wait! There’s more! You see, at that point I was over 89K. And that nice, tasty 90K landmark looked so close. I could write part of the first scene of Act Five, and feel really virtuous.

. . . except that the first scene ended up dropping me a hundred and fifty words shy of 90K, because it was so short.

So, in a fit of sheer bull-headedness, I started the next scene, praying I would get that 150 before I got into the meat of it, since I haven’t yet decided how [spoiler] is going to happen. I should have had two more days to make that decision, going at a normal pace, but tonight was not normal; tonight was 3041 words of headlong charging.

The novel is now 90005 words in length.

Act Four ran long, by a couple thousand words; that isn’t the end of the world, but when I revise I’ll see if I can’t tighten it. Act Five . . . you know how sometimes people say, “I know how long my legs are; they’re long enough to reach the ground”? Act Five will be long enough to reach the end. It may be short. I don’t kow. I’m just praying it doesn’t head too firmly in the other direction, because that would muck up this whole August 8th plan.

Unless I wrote 3K every day. But that would be a bad idea.

In fact, why am I still at my keyboard? Good night.

Authorial sadism: They figured out the plot.

LBR quota: Love and blood — my favorites.

80K on the nose. It’s a meaningless benchmark, when you get down to it — the lower limit of what one can generally sell as adult fantasy, but not the lower limit of my contract — but it’s a nice round number, and the point at which I start feeling like the book will end sometime soon.

Where by “soon” I mean “in another thirty thousand words or so.”

I can see from here to the end of Act Four. Most of Act Five has fallen into place in my head, except for a few things involving Deven. I’m chugging up the last long slope of the rollercoaster; once we crest the top of that hill, it’s going to be a downhill charge from here to the end.

Probably. I’ve been known to be wrong before. But it doesn’t feel like I’ll be wrong.

I’m in the middle of the second incredibly delicate conversation with Elizabeth. At least this time it’s a conversation with Elizabeth, instead of a conversation at Elizabeth like the last one was, damned canny close-mouthed queen that she is. The rest of Act Four will go something like this: oh crap, I think we were wrong; a tricky conversation with a personified natural landmark; oh holy shit were we wrong. Then on to Act Five, and Blowing Stuff Up. (feyangel, you may consider that an unintended tribute to BSU Pyrotechnics.)

I just wish I could figure out that one last piece of Act Five.

Authorial sadism: We’re in the part of the book where I lose track of it all. But aside from what I did to Suspiria, I think my favorite is probably the bit where Deven and Lune realize how different their two Courts are. Or, y’know, having to talk at Elizabeth, instead of with her.

LBR quota: We’re never without all three these days, but rhetoric was at the top of today’s menu, with the other two as side dishes.

Point A: I have stubbornly refused to miss a day of writing since the beginning of June.

Point B: It is a long-standing principle of mine that the day is not over until the sun has risen or I have slept.

Point C: Check the time-stamp on this post.

If A, and B, but C, then . . . I’m a bloody idiot, is what.

Last night was a triumph of sheer bloody-mindedness over, well, everything else.

You see, I didn’t get started writing until after 3 a.m. And I couldn’t sleep in today. And I had been watching horror movies since 11 that morning. And when I reached eleven hundred and some-odd words — a good total for the day, regardless — I made myself go just a little bit further, so I could retire for my insufficient night’s sleep knowing that I had crossed the 70K threshold.

So yeah. 70045 words on Midnight Never Come.

Act Four is giving me hives. This is the part of the book where, if I were still a little baby writer, somebody would probably sit the main characters down and Explain Everything they need to know to deal with the rest of the plot. But I’m not a little baby writer, and so I have to try to complicate it: interrupt the flow of information by throwing in threats and interpersonal conflicts and awkward moments and assassination attempts and misunderstandings and people forgetting to mention things and leaping to the wrong conclusions. (Which is why a part of the book I could have disposed of in a few thousand overly straightforward words will instead eat an entire act.)

My difficulties arise from figuring out who knows what, when they learned it, what will spark them into mentioning it, what conclusions they have drawn about it, and how I can juggle all of this together into a story that leads the main characters to where they need to go.

My thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions on how to write the crazy Tiresias scenes. I have a variety of plans in mind, some of which do involve staying up all night — more than I have been already, that is — and hopefully that will work out well.

Mush onward, to 80 and then 90K.

Authorial sadism: First Deven complains that I don’t give him any answers; then he complains about the answers I give him. Ungrateful bastard. (Though I will admit I tried to make “I did not have to” the most painful five words I’ve inflicted on him yet.)

LBR quota: I found a way to kill another character. Aren’t you proud of me?

Sometimes, to write 1082 words, one must first delete 363.

That revelation just wasn’t working there. It was one too many. From my perspective, there’s now a glaring question of why certain characters didn’t bring up a certain topic at a certain time, but hopefully I can distract readers from that temporary omission with some flourishes on a different front. The information will show up later; just not now.

It sucks that my net progress for the day is less than 1K, though. I know it happens sometimes, but it still sucks. (Especially when I deleted two hundred and change a week or so ago.) Things like this make my end-of-month goal just a little bit harder to achieve.

Edit: Oh, hell. I really am a bloody-minded OCD Virgo fanatic. 412 more puts me at 1494 for the night, and 1131 net.

And since I’m adding that, I might as well add these.

Authorial sadism: giving somebody a ride in the sixteenth century means sharing a saddle with them. i.e. getting very cozy.

LBR quota: it’s always more fun when the pain is caused by love.

We’ll call that the end of Act Three. It doesn’t have any flashbacks in it, and it should, but I don’t yet know what one of them is going to be, and the other will either be the coronation scene I have already written, or the scene that takes place after the execution of the Queen of Scots; I need to write Act Four before I’ll know which scene goes there and which one goes here.

I mentioned before that now’s when the backstory starts coming out. That’s a cool thing, from my point of view — the backstory is easily half of why I wanted to write this novel — but the corollary difficulty is that this chunk of the novel, the end of Act Three and probably a goodly chunk of Act Four, threatens to be very exposition-heavy. Which is undesirable at any time, but particularly in the middle of a book. (The only worse place to put it is the end.) So I need to find ways to convey that information without letting it slow the story down.

Having characters come near to stabbing each other in the middle of the exposition is one way to do it. But I mustn’t overuse that trick.

So this is why Act Four is something of a gaping void in my head. Not because I don’t have anything with which to fill it — I’ve got easily half a dozen major revelations that need to occur — but because I haven’t yet figured out how to make those revelations happen in exciting ways, with enough other stuff going around and between them. Act Five will be a cakewalk by comparison, as it will probably only have one Terrible Revelation (assuming it isn’t used to end Act Four), followed by a lot of stuff blowing up.

And somewhere in there, I need to go rewrite half of Act One, the Deven half. I can leave that segment in 1588, but what I’m doing with him there just Doesn’t Work. On the bright side, changing it means I’ll probably get to stick in a scene I had given up on having in the novel, namely, a chase across the roofs of Hampton Court Palace.

Anyway. Time to re-read Act Three and hope it doesn’t suck, then maybe noodle around a bit with how to start Act Four.

Three-fifths of the way done.

Authorial sadism: making Lune be herself during that conversation.

LBR tally: Rhetoric just stuck a knife between Love’s ribs, which I suppose counts as Blood, too.

A little while ago, I made a rambly post about how it might be problematic that a sizeable but not sizeable enough chunk of the book takes place in 1588, while the rest of it is in 1590. It’s about twenty-one thousand words, which is way too long to be anything like a prologue, but not really a third of the book, which I could justifiably label “Part One” and move on from there.

It is, however, approximately a fifth of a book.

And the five-act structure was, y’know, really popular back then.

So despite the fact that this book may end up having nothing to do with theatre aside from a title ganked from Marlowe, Midnight Never Come will be delivered in five Acts, possibly with a prologue and an epilogue, despite the usual shortcomings of such devices. I read up on five-act structure, so the book wouldn’t just be arbitrarily chopped into fifths, and it seems like it will fit very well. This was a pretty suitable Act Two, at least, and the next one will most definitely be an Act Three.

Anyway, I expected to be making this post tomorrow night or possibly the night after. But the Lune scene I was finishing ended about thirty words short of my 1K quota, and rather than falling into the bad habit of padding it out to make my goal (or letting myself stop, like a sane person might), I decided to get at least thirty words into the next scene.

. . . only, in the act of typing the scene header (I’m identifying where and when each scene takes place, since the story covers so much of both time and space), I changed my mind entirely about what the scene would be. Deven can do all that stuff I was intending at the beginning of Act Three. The last scene of Act Two ended up being less than three hundred words long — which is why I just wrote the whole damn thing. It seemed silly to get thirty words in and stop. So instead of starting a scene that would have taken at least one night to finish, probably two, I’m done right now.

Two Acts down. Three to go.

It’s a good place to be.

Authorial sadism: Swift kicks to the kidneys, and the unexpected replacement scene.

LBR quota: They’re all blood, you see.