Draft 1 is now at the half-way mark (of the plot), so far 68,754 words.

Writing progress as of 24th October 2018. Half-way through!

Today I wrote a few words (maybe around 700), but I was mostly transferring text from Draft 0 into Draft 1, tweaking any major continuity problems but not worrying about the text itself overly much. I probably spent about 3 hours in total re-reading what I’d previously written, checking it fit in the new structure, and moving it into place.

19,482 words are now in the draft that were not yesterday.

Draft 1 is now at the half-way mark (of the plot), so far 68,754 words.

Obviously this implies that I’ll be ending on about 140,000 words, making for a very long novel. I fully expect to cut a great deal of what I’ve written so far, as I tend to over-explain and spell things out for the reader, something that will be removed when I start the first editing pass.

About 43,000 words remain in Draft 0 to be moved over, which I expect will take me to the end of act two - so if I can keep this pace up I should be done with the transfers by the weekend. I suspect I will slow down though, as the second half of the novel was where I began to realise I’d lost the plot (literally) and so there may well be more writing required to get to the 3rd act. To balance this out though I suspect a lot of those words can be cut without harming the plot - and I will do so if I see an opportunity now.

At this point, I’m not going line-by-line deciding if I need to cut a sentence or a few words, any cuts I make are at the scene or even chapter level. For example there was a long introduction to two minor characters which I could lose entirely, just by adding a note to future me to remind me to scatter key description information through the scene itself. I have not done those additions now so as to keep up the pace of ‘writing’. They’ll be done when I come to the line-by-line editing after the first draft is completed.

For now I’m working very much according to the NaNoWriMo guidelines - never go back, don’t edit, just get words down. All the advice I’ve seen suggests this is a good way to work, as it’s easier to fix a broken novel than to create things from thin air. This way I’ll have a story to massage into shape, rather than three perfect opening chapters and nothing more.