Friday, March 12, 2010

Old Hundredth

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My old friend George R.R. Martin to the contrary, Spring Is Coming!

As if to mark this event, I passed a milestone yesterday.  The Darger and Surplus novel just crossed the hundred-thousand-word mark.  And how close is that to completion?  Well . . . normally, my novels are made up of twenty chapters of five thousand words each.  It used to spook Marianne how tidily that came out.  But this one's coming out a little longer than usual.

How much longer?  Not much.  Maybe five thousand, maybe ten thousand words.  Which means that I am close as close to finished.

And keeping my nose to the grindstone, staying at home working, foregoing adventures of all sorts in order to get this thing written and done with.  Which is why today the only news I have at all is that:


Above:  The first flowers of the year have bloomed in our back yard.  And, mirabile dictu,  they weren't crocuses.  They were snowdrops.  This has been a strange winter.

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4 comments:

Pat J said...

I am very much looking forward to reading the Darger and Surplus novel.

Pebble Texture said...

I think you should indulge in at least a few adventures now. The book will be better for it. You could write them off as business expenses...

David Stone said...

Have you ever been tempted to crunch the numbers and figure out how much your writing is worth in words/US$, so you can slip in an extra page or two to cover the cost of a bottle or two of premium bourbon?

Michael Swanwick said...

Hah! No, that's an old writer's fantasy:

"To be or not to be, that is the question."

"Be!"

"Not be!"

"Be!"

"Not be!"

"Be!"

"Not be!"

"Be!"

"Not be!"


Ad infinitem.

But alas . . . Gordon Van Gelder can see through that ploy in his sleep.