I put this on Twitter (and therefore Facebook), but not in the one place I should have:

On Sunday I rolled over 70,000 words on The Black Hour.

Woot!

Done? Nope. But getting closer. My original deadline was June 5. My new goal is July 8. That’s 38 days from now…carry the one…if the book is 100K words, that means I need to write 789 words everyday until July 8 to have a rough draft.

[Which means I should stop spending my time revising. My writing process could be modeled by a Slinky, stretched out into a long line of loops: Write, loop back and edit, write, loop, loop, loop, loop. Not exactly a process I would encourage anyone to use, and yet I do it.]

789 words each and every day. That’s still rather steep for me. I need to either get up earlier, stay up later, or clone myself a Lori to go sit at my desk at Major U. All equally likely, I’m afraid.

If I only count the 33 weekdays (yes, sometimes I’m better at getting work done during the week instead of the weekends), I’d have to write 909 words a day.

In any case, a good goal would be 1,000 words a day, five days a week.

WORDS TO LIVE BY. But can I do it? Let’s see.

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I have to miss the Printers Row Book Fest once again. I’m a sad about it, but I’ll survive. You should go, though, and tell everyone I said hi. Maybe I’ll see them next year.

God, maybe I’ll BE ONE OF THEM next year. You go and tell them I’m on my way.