Black Dog Blog

As of tonight, I've finished rewriting the short story I wrote last year, which is forming Part One of Sankmarray-the-Novel. Yep, the cheaty part is over. We're now in uncharted waters.

And to prevent myself from being show-stoppingly nervous about continuing to write in said uncharted waters, I made sure to write the first bit of Part Two before I stopped.

I'm now at 11,938 words. *writerly glow*

I'm aiming for roughly 2000 words a day, i.e. a 60k word book (because I hate messy numbers like 1667, and anyway Mews turned out at just over 60k, so there).

By that projected total and my current word count, I should be a fifth of the way through the story now. Since I've only just reached the end of Part One, and I don't know how long the other parts will turn out (or even how I'll end up dividing the rest of the plot outline into sections yet), I have no idea if this is accurate. It feels awfully odd that my 'short' story, with a lot of crap taken out and only a couple of thousand words added overall, is technically a fifth of a novel. But, well, to be honest, I suspect this is going to be a rather long book.

The first of two books, I remind myself…

I'll shortly be contacting the people who offered to alpha read and probably have no idea what they're letting themselves in for (er, well, Anke and Vespers probably do, so they really do have no excuse whatsoever). For the rest of you, there's a second excerpt up now at my NaNoWriMo profile. This one shows a little more of the worldbuilding, and a tiny bit of Roseeye, the piratical first mate, of whom I'm rather fond.