Doing the math

As of today, I’ve written 40 000 words of this draft of my novel.

My original goal was to make this version 90 000 words long. When I track my progress on my scene-by-scene outline, however, I can see that I’ve only written about a third of the scenes I’ve laid out for this draft.

I seem to average about 1000 words per scene. A few are much shorter (less than 300 words) or longer (over 2000), but they all tend to balance out to 1000 words.

I just counted my remaining scenes, and there are just over 100.

Aargh! If my math is correct, and I think it is, this draft could end up being more than 140 000 words long.

One hundred and forty thousand. That’s 50 000 more than I expected or planned.

This also means that my original March 31st deadline is completely, insanely unrealistic. I generally write about 5000 words per week, so if I keep going at this pace, I can expect to have this draft finished in about 20 weeks. That takes me all the way to June 30th.

Aaargh, again.

And yet—ok. If that’s how long this is going to take, so be it. I could make more of an effort to keep my scenes shorter, or I could step up my daily writing goals, but in the end, I need to get the story written, and that will take as long as it takes. Once the whole draft is finished, my beta readers and I will be able to read it over and start figuring out how to trim it down to a more reasonable size.

Or maybe the next draft will be even longer. (Aaargh!) Time will tell.