Or, if I had 18,249 in the last draft, at the plot point I'm now at, and I have 28, 357 words at that same point now, and the old draft was a total of 119,412 words, then the new draft is likely to be about 180,000 words to maintain a similar density and consistency of prose, which means that I have 150,000 words left to revise in the next 34 days, and about 50,000 of those will be new words.
Who knew writers had to know so much math?
Writing does get done in between the bouts of procrastination somehow. Sometime last week I finished revisions on "The Marrying Kind," which Melcher has signed off on and sent a contract on; I should be paid sometime soonish. Bob is negotiating my larger short story contracts, which is nice, but weird too. I'm so used to the last ten years of going over the contracts myself, trying to figure out which rights I actually don't want to give them. It's nice to have someone else doing that, even if he does talk about rights I don't quite understand. Probably best to have him doing it instead of me, given the not-understanding part. (For those of you eager to read an erotica story about Leilani (from "Pieces of the Heart") at age thirty-or-so, I'm afraid you'll have to either find a copy of Aqua Erotica 2 or wait a year after the book comes out for me to put the story on my website. We tried for less time, but no dice.)
Yesterday I finished revising chapter 3, and got a good chunk of the way into chapter 4, in the process deciding that chapter 4 was too long, and it would now be chapter 4 and 5. I have abandoned any hope of making the chapters about the same length -- in the first draft, they somehow ended up all around 5000 words. That's totally out the window now. We now have:
- Chapter 1: 5,914 words
- Chapter 2: 9,312 words
- Chapter 3: 10,148 words
Also today, workout with Lakshmi at 10:30, prep for class, try taking the subway/shuttle out to the Schaumburg campus, write some more out there (conveniently, in addition to my having a shared office, there's a Borders literally next door, presumably with a cafe; I will be there muchly this semester, I think), catch-up on Kriti e-mail, teach class, take the shuttle home, getting in v. late (around 10:30 p.m., I think). A long day, but hopefully a good one. We'll see.