Someday, there will be a title

47278 / 50000 words. 95% done!

I should be finished on Wednesday. Why do I assume 50,000 words? Because I conceived and then paced the book to be 50,000 words. I'm used to writing scripts, college essays, and flash fiction. I'm a fiend at writing to specific lengths. By proper manuscript count, of course, it's much longer - it'll be something like 63,000. I write short chapters and lots of dialog. In any case, if it goes longer, it will be because I picked up steam and decided to kick out an extra 4000 words for the fun of it, to really stretch out the tragedy - in which case I still plan to power through on Wednesday. Which will give me Thursday to do any last revisions, and maybe come up with a title.

It's not a masterwork, but it's fairly entertaining and relatively thoughtful. I'll be surprised if it doesn't sell quickly. I will also be surprised it sells for a lot of money or is a runaway hit. Then again, I'm appallingly bad at guessing what people like to read or watch. I will, however place an outside bet on the idea that if it does become a runaway success, this will correlate with the book being marketed as somehow connected to The Lovely Bones, despite a glaring lack of similarities. That seems to be how these things work.

The idea of waiting for three months to hear back from anyone drives me crazy. I'm used to it with short stories, but I really just want to hand this to an editor at a large publishing house with whom I have an established relationship. Sadly, there is not such a person yet.

My mouth continues to attack me in crazy ways, and I have a headache, and I have menstrual cramps. On the good side of things, I picked up an antique chest of drawers from Uncle Rex, played Jotto with Chad, and ate bagels with Merlin. My obsession with the game Harvest Moon continues. I think it is very important that I raise sheep and marry an archaeologist.