Draft 1 is now at approximately 79%, 110,880 words.

Writing progress as of 27th October 2018.

As I said yesterday, I have run out of old words to copy/paste into place. As such I spent a couple of hours today writing new ones. But first, I set up the Scrivener target for my estimated word count total.

As you saw from my ‘half-way’ blog post , I think that I will probably end on about 140,000 if sheer word count is my measure. The ‘quarters’ of the book are growing though - the first was about 30,000 words. The second quarter was nearer 36,000 and quarter three hit 40,000. Since I tend to over-write anyway I’ve left my target at 140,000 but anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 for the final section is probably fine.

Another previous blog post said that I’d made a public declaration of finishing this draft by Christmas - which as of right now is 58 days away (I know). Simple maths, or Scrivener’s target tool, tells me that I need to write 537 words a day to hit that goal. Obviously I’ll write more than that, if I can, but it’s a very small daily amount which does help to make the mountain seem more conquerable. And in fact today, despite being my first real writing day in over a year, I’ve managed over 2,000 words! I will talk more about how I write, and in particular how comparing your own daily word-count to someone else’s is not at all useful, in a later blog post.

2,032 words are now in the draft that were not yesterday.

Draft 1 is now at approximately 79%, 110,880 words.