Totally rocking it (sorry for the radio silence)

Uhm... I haven't written in six weeks. Are we still in ROW Round 3?  :o)

In my defense, I had strep throat at the beginning of August and I've had a cold for more than a week. I've been hitting (usually surpassing) my Round 3 goal, but I haven't had time or energy for writing blog posts. When I sit down to write, I just want to work on my WIP. Why waste a precious half hour doing my ROW update if I could put in 600 words?

Sigh. I'm sure you know the feeling.

And now that I've ignored you all for the last month, I miss my writer friends and the ROW community.

So here's an abbreviated multi-week update: The past few days have been all about editing, having spent the previous week on a writing sprint. The explosion of words was just that -- a messy blowup of stuff. I over-wrote the scenes I was working on. Now I have to cut out huge chunks of text. I've removed about 700 words (yikes!), spent three days of what could have been writing time to do the edits, and it's still not perfect. The length is better, so when I come back around to do a scene-by-scene edit I can get tweak the wording to perfection (ha, ha).

Overall I've been devoting lots of free time to my novel. As of my last post (on 7/20) the word count total was 40k. Now I'm up to 85k. I think the final product will be in excess of 100k, but maybe not to the 115k level I previously thought I would reach. (And that's fine. My editor is still groaning at the "behemoth" coming her way. I'm not sorry, JR! :o)

I plan to complete the first draft in September, then start editing. The delusional part of me thinks I can actually get the novel written and all of my edits done this month. Over-reaching much?

In reality, if I can have the novel to my editor by the end of October, that would be glorious. Then she can spend a few weeks with it and I can start working with my web designer and my graphic editor to build my site and my brand. (By the way, my delusional self thinks I can get the website running and my graphics started this month, and done by October. Again, I know that's crazy. I'm just excited.)

So onward and upward, brave writers! I go now to read some of your blogs.... and figure out when this ROW ends. (Seriously, it's still Round 3, right?!)