This post is about 250 words.

A quiet house tonight put me in the exact frame of mind to crank out a few thousand words: mostly new, but some came from light editing. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been filling in some gaps (intros, transitions, chapter ends), and tonight saw more of the same.

I also worked on the intro to the final conflict with the primary antagonist, shifting and re-shifting sections as I tried to find the right sequence of information delivered by the dialogue. It’s a complex section that recaps information from earlier in the book, parts of which are not fully fleshed out yet.

Then I saw the word count pass 90,000 words.

I’ve exceeded my word count range (though I expect to cut a number of things in the second draft). It’s now twice as long as anything I’ve ever written, which feels pretty good. But as I find myself beyond the self-imposed deadline of the first draft, I wonder how much more fleshing-out is required before the draft is done. I might have to stop at 100,000 words because that’s a pretty long book for a first-time author, as well as for the audience I’m trying to reach. I’m not one to limit a story to satisfy a metric like word count, but compromises are sometimes required. We’ll see.

–Michael