I’m sitting here listening to a football game on the ‘radio’ which is actually online, but the fact that I’m doing that precludes me from writing, even though the kids are down for their afternoon nap.  But I’m not feeling too bad about not writing right now, because I passed the 70,000 word mark last night, and have about 7-8 chapters left to write – somewhere between 10000 and 16000 words, depending on how verbose I get.  At this rate I should be done at some point during the Thanksgiving weekend.  YAY!

I’m already thinking about the edit on this one, before I even come up with a title for it.  It’s currently called The Unexplored Territory which screams “Hello Generic Book!”.  I’ve also considered The Army of the Purple Stain which sounds like it’s about the male gender’s worst nightmare, a bunch of armed, severely PMS’ing women.  Those are two examples of why I probably won’t mind if whatever publisher I find helps to come up with a better title.

I know my editing passes won’t need to be as dramatic as they were on The Forgotten Road.  I’ve learned a lot since I wrote the first draft of TFR, and I really don’t see having to re-architect this one.  I do see having to do a pass for continuity and place names (which I am also horrible at).  I know I’ve got places where one of the characters travels for 1 day, but is gone for 3, and doesn’t sleep the whole time.  Don’t think that passes the credibility check.  I also have dramatic weather shifts from nasty, wet coastal winter, to tropical beach like conditions in the space of 24 hours.  Not a huge bearing on the story either way, but geez… you’d think I’d figure that out a little better.

So hopefully, one more week and I’ll be done this first draft.  It’ll be nice to be done, and I can go back to doing some reading sometime in December.  I miss not having much spare time.