Wow, look at that novel word count gadget, huh? Nearly 91'000 words! Rounded up, that's damn close to being 91%! And that's really close to 100%, right? Which must mean I'm really, really close to finishing!
Orrrrrrr not.
However, unlike with my last book Funland, which overran like a mad thing on a treadmill, I did actually know I was kidding myself this time around. Truth is, this time it wasn't bad planning to blame but my being far too lazy to do slightly complicated mathematics. The sad fact is, I couldn't find a wordometer that actually calculated the percentage completed for me - so I figured it would be easier to pretend Crown Thief was going to be a nice round 100'000 words in length and save myself some brain pain.
Which of course begs the question, how close am I to actually finishing? Or, to put it another way - just how much did I cheat the stats by? And the answer to that one is ... eight thousand words. I think. Assuming, that is, that all four of the remaining chapters stay within my guesstimated per-chapter count of 4500 words, which so far only four out of eighteen chapters have actually done. But, even taking that into account, it's unlikely I've got more than about twenty two thousand words to go in total. At my current rate of 6000-ish words a week, that means I should be finishing around the middle of July, a week or two behind my hoped-for end date and nearly two months ahead of my worst case scenario. Barring disaster, I've about three more weeks of work before I can legitimately type "The End".
Based on the last four months, however, "barring disaster" is like saying "barring the sun coming up in the morning". Frankly, I'm not entirely sure how I've managed to stay this on target through the bewildering whirlwind of crap that's been swirling since christmas. I won't go into details here, but let's just say that if anything could go wrong this year it probably has, and if it couldn't it probably did anyway.
So, far I've dropped a week behind the schedule I set out way back in March, and to some extent that was only because a couple of other major projects became too urgent to sideline. I'm quite proud of this fact. I'll be really seriously proud if I wrap Crown Thief up for the 8th of July, my current target date. Of course, it's probably worth pointing out that by "wrap up", I mean, "finish the first draft." There's still a ton of work, in the form of at least two more drafts, left to do. Still, I feel fairly good about what I've got down so far, and how close it is to what I intended. Here's hoping I don't completely screw the pooch in these last (fingers crossed!) three weeks.
Orrrrrrr not.
However, unlike with my last book Funland, which overran like a mad thing on a treadmill, I did actually know I was kidding myself this time around. Truth is, this time it wasn't bad planning to blame but my being far too lazy to do slightly complicated mathematics. The sad fact is, I couldn't find a wordometer that actually calculated the percentage completed for me - so I figured it would be easier to pretend Crown Thief was going to be a nice round 100'000 words in length and save myself some brain pain.
Which of course begs the question, how close am I to actually finishing? Or, to put it another way - just how much did I cheat the stats by? And the answer to that one is ... eight thousand words. I think. Assuming, that is, that all four of the remaining chapters stay within my guesstimated per-chapter count of 4500 words, which so far only four out of eighteen chapters have actually done. But, even taking that into account, it's unlikely I've got more than about twenty two thousand words to go in total. At my current rate of 6000-ish words a week, that means I should be finishing around the middle of July, a week or two behind my hoped-for end date and nearly two months ahead of my worst case scenario. Barring disaster, I've about three more weeks of work before I can legitimately type "The End".
Based on the last four months, however, "barring disaster" is like saying "barring the sun coming up in the morning". Frankly, I'm not entirely sure how I've managed to stay this on target through the bewildering whirlwind of crap that's been swirling since christmas. I won't go into details here, but let's just say that if anything could go wrong this year it probably has, and if it couldn't it probably did anyway.
So, far I've dropped a week behind the schedule I set out way back in March, and to some extent that was only because a couple of other major projects became too urgent to sideline. I'm quite proud of this fact. I'll be really seriously proud if I wrap Crown Thief up for the 8th of July, my current target date. Of course, it's probably worth pointing out that by "wrap up", I mean, "finish the first draft." There's still a ton of work, in the form of at least two more drafts, left to do. Still, I feel fairly good about what I've got down so far, and how close it is to what I intended. Here's hoping I don't completely screw the pooch in these last (fingers crossed!) three weeks.
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