I reached a milestone today that I felt warranted a quick post. After reworking my story early last year, I emerged with an outline for a 5-part story, with parts 1-3 roughly correlating to my earlier outlined material, and parts 4&5 rendering a proper conclusion, which was lacking in the early drafts.

Today, I finished the draft of part 2, bringing the manuscript total up to 132,385 words. In the final draft, I’d hope to get that down to 90k. Somehow.

This is also the furthest I’ve gone, words-wise, into any previous revision of Lunhina (and this is draft 5 if we’re counting strictly). I like where this one is heading, I like how the world building is coming together, and I really like how some of the twists are getting staged. I am very excited to get the rest of this draft hammered down. Most critically, I don’t see any barriers between here and there, which was not the case in any previous outline.

I set some goals for myself this year, and if I can stick to them, I might, just might, have this thing “finished” by the end of the year. My work is somewhat seasonal, giving me a relatively quiet spring and summer, and the kids are getting a little older, hopefully promising full-night’s rest sometime soon. With these factors converging, I have high hopes.

Part 2 was not without its hurdles. In fact, just yesterday I paged back to reference a description from part 1 and was dismayed to find I’d written an entire reveal scene several months ago, then apparently shuffled it in the outline, forgotten, then re-wrote it just a few days past without realizing. It took some work to figure out what was supposed to go where and revise one of the two versions to work. I got there in the end.

Tomorrow I set out on part 3. The latter half of this section is particularly well outlined and should be a breeeze. The first half requires a bit more set work. With any luck, I’ll have a similar status report in a couple months.