Sorry, no essay today, but I crossed through page 100 on my new draft.  I draft on 8.5×11″ pages — or rather, their electronic equivalent — so that’s about 56,000 words.  In a trade paperback, that would be closing in on page 200.

I’m more or less on track to finish up by the end of July.  I’m setting a pace for 90,000 words, though my drafts tend to come in closer to 80,000 with another 5-10K creeping in during the edit phase.  This is for two reasons: first, my drafts are often light on needed description, and second, my initial drafts sometimes include notes like “hey, this gun needs to show up back in act 1.”  So, while there is some tightening of the prose during the edits, I also add a fair amount, sometimes in snippets and sometimes entire scenes.

It’s also been interesting in that I’m writing a sequel to a book that won’t come out until this fall, and I still have time to go back and change things in that first book.  So, as I’m winding this one down and firming up the ideas for the next three (it’s a 5-book series… I think), I’m seeing a couple of items that I need to go back and drop into the first book.  Things that, y’know… might be IMPORTANT later.

So, back to the word mines.  I’ve got another six or seven pages before the next bad thing happens to our heroes.