Progress report:

Last time looked at: 2/17/17

Last actual wordage added: 2/17/17

Pages added, 2/17/17: 0.

Current page count: 489

Estimated final page count: 490-525?

Deadline: None, but Wildside says they’ll send me a contract any day
now.

Comments: That got complicated.

I’ve rearranged all the chapters, but then there were formatting issues and WordPerfect crashed and… well, things got a bit damaged. No text was lost, but I’m still cleaning up dropped indents and so on.

You will recall that I wasn’t happy with how the different storylines matched up. I had them arranged like this (M=Morvash, D=Darissa, H=Hakin):

MDMDMDMDMDMDMDMHMHMHMHMHMHMHM… (That was as far as I’d gotten in the second draft.)

Well, now they’re MDMDMDMHDMHDMHDMHDMMHMMHMMHM… And everything lines up nicely. I think it actually has a better flow, too, starting Hakin’s story earlier.

I’m only up to Chapter Twenty-One with the formatting clean-up, and I still want to tweak the chronology a bit (two different sequences wound up in the month of Longdays, ten years apart, which I think is a potential source of confusion).

So there’s more I should do, but it’s past my bedtime.

Word-count is now 121,331

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 2/16/17

Last actual wordage added: 2/16/17

Pages added, 2/16/17: That’s complicated. More than one, fewer than seven.

Current page count: 490

Estimated final page count: 490-525?

Deadline: None, but Wildside says they’ll send me a contract any day now.

Comments: Okay, I’ve gotten to the point in the second draft where the stories all merge, and I definitely need to rearrange some chapters. In fact, I’ve split one in half, and moved the first half back to earlier, so as to make the events line up properly.

That’s responsible for part of the increase in page count; I’m not sure how much.

I’m at the break between Chapter Twenty-Seven and Chapter Twenty-Eight (which used to be 26 and 27); everything is now on the correct side of this break, but some earlier chapters need to be rearranged.

I’ve been correcting a lot of chronology; I discovered I had misremembered the date of The Unwelcome Warlock.

A third draft will definitely be necessary, but for now I’m just trying to get through the second.

Word-count is now 121,279

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 2/12/17

Last actual wordage added: 2/12/17

Pages added, 2/12/17: 1

Current page count: 481

Estimated final page count: 482-525?

Deadline: None, but Wildside says they’ll send me a contract any day
now.

Comments: Seven chapters into the second draft, and still going smoothly. I don’t know why, but it took me forever to get started tonight; I just wasn’t in a writing mood, though once I did start it was fine.

I’m over 120,000 words!

Chapter Seven is short; if this were a serial I couldn’t count it. It’s only seven pages.

At this point, in the restructured format, I’m alternating viewpoints between Morvash and Darissa; Zerra hasn’t been seen since the prologue, and Hakin has yet to appear. Morvash’s chapters are forty-seven years later than Darissa’s; I hope readers will notice that, since the dates are in every chapter heading.

Word-count is now 120,148

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 2/11/17

Last actual wordage added: 2/11/17

Pages added, 2/11/17: 1, I guess.

Current page count: 480

Estimated final page count: 480-525?

Deadline: None, but Wildside says they’ll send me a contract any day
now.

Comments: Okay, I’m five chapters into the second draft. It’s going
fairly well. Still a long way to go, though. (I think there are 44
chapters at present.)

Progress report:

Last time looked at: 2/8/17

Last actual wordage added: 2/8/17

Pages added, 2/8/17: Probably none.

Current page count: 479

Estimated final page count: 480-525?

Deadline: None, but Wildside says they’ll send me a contract any day
now.

Comments: I’m working on the second draft of this next Ethshar novel. After the delay to relocate webpages I felt it necessary to start the revising over from the beginning, and I’m glad I did, as I caught a few things I wanted to fix. I’ve gotten through the prologue and the first two chapters. So far it looks pretty good.

But then I decided to do something else. See next rock.

Word-count is now 119,733.