Not really. But I am reporting in. Tonight I’m up to exactly 88,000 words for Xia. I’ll feel better when I’ve cracked 90. That’s pretty much done for me, which in this case means ready for more massive editing. The strange thing is I have only 29 chapters, and usually at this point I have 30-33. So I started looking for chapters that were 14 or more pages since for me that’s a chapter that’s too long. But there weren’t any. What I have is a lot of chapters with 11-12 pages. Not long enough to need to chop in half. So, maybe this book will end up with fewer chapters than usual.

What else? I have some writing related have-to-do stuff that I really have to get done tomorrow that isn’t writing Xia.

Thursday, I got ZIP writing done. My son fell in P.E. and bloodied himself up enough that he had to come home. My dad went to get him so I didn’t have to leave work. But I talked to him on the phone and once I was sure he was mostly OK, told him to work on his English project, which was due Friday. He needed to create a facsimile of a newspaper page containing articles about some short stories they read. When I got home, had he done any of that work? No, he had not. And he’s a terrible speller and well, it was 9:30 before the project was done, assembled and mostly error free. Friday, I was going to give him a lecture about how disappointed I was that he hadn’t had the time to do his best work. Only he starts telling me how when he turned it in the teacher said that if it didn’t contain a lot of spelling errors, it looked like A work to her. Dang you, teacher! And that she would show his to all the students who complained about not getting an A on theirs. So, no lecture.

Any way it’s my usual sign off tonight. I’m tired and going to bed.

Did more fixing of chapters 27 and 28. Mostly 28. Tomorrow, I think I’ll print it out and start from the beginning.

Tired.

Going to bed.

Today I hit 80,383 words for Xia, after chopping much of the current last chapter and rewriting it completely. (My contract sets out a word count of 85-95K, but I’m never done until I’m between 90 and 95K) All the rest are brand spanking new words. Carolyn like shiny things! For the last four days I’ve been see-sawing between 78 and 79K. Cut some stuff, write some stuff. Cut more stuff, write more stuff. But tonight I have not only the ending roughed out, but a tentative title in place.

I also substantially redid chapter 27. Mostly it was total carnage. I think there’s like 5 words left from the original chapter 28 and 10 left from chapter 27. But they’re a really good Five and Dime. (Joke!! I made a joke — does anybody get that?)

Right. What else?

Um, I signed up for a Twhirl account (what is it with these Web 2.0 names?) and got my twitter stuff on my desktop. And I learned that while I was writing and rewriting, a lot, and I do mean a lot, of people were watching TV. And twittering about it, obviously. Kind of blew my mind. So, right now, every aspiring writer should be swearing off TV. Because while you were doing that instead of writing, I was getting myself inches from meeting my deadline with time to spare.

What do you want? To write the book of your heart (because there’s no point to writing any other kind) or know what happens on Battlestar Galactica tonight instead of later after you’ve hit your minimum? Just pointing that out there.

Of course if you are a writer who is procrastinating, that’s a time honored method of building up the appropriate level of panic to get your butt stuck to the chair. By all means, watch TV. But if you don’t have a deadline, TV is probably a bad thing for your writing.

Off to bed.

Working madly on Xia, of course. Have thought of a possibly lame title. I need to push on, so back to work. Just letting you-all know I’m still alive. Sort of.