Draft 1 is now at just over 80% complete, 114,962 words.

Writing progress as of 2nd November 2018.

Another day, another chapter! It seems that about 2,000 words a day is a sensible goal at the moment. In the past I tended to write 2,500 in each sitting and that was a perfectly achievable target, but for some reason that always still ended up as a single chapter - and I don’t think it was necessarily any better for being longer. In fact, that might well be why I am going to end up with a 140,000 word first draft!

Given how I broke down the 3-act structure I wrote about the other day, I have about 20 chapters per act for 60 in total. That works out to an average of 2,333 words per chapter. Now at present the chapters themselves are not adhering to any kind of structure, but are instead simply a collection of each day’s writing - chances are the final novel will not have 60 chapters broken into 3 parts but for now it’s a good way of making sure I have the key narrative events correctly spaced.

When it comes to revision, editing and no doubt chopping out a lot of over-explanation and redundant information, I hope that I’ll be cutting more or less evenly throughout. That way the plot points will still hit their marks and I won’t have to restructure again. Most likely though I will be moving chapter breaks around to improve readability and also to keep people turning to the next page! Fortunately Scrivener does make that very easy.

2,029 words are now in the draft that were not yesterday.

Draft 1 is now at just over 80% complete, 114,962 words.