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I passed 50,000 words this week.
I had a whole letter planned about it. The halfway high, the view from the top of the hill. Then I looked at what was left, and found out I'm not halfway at all.
The book got bigger
I outlined Dustling at 95,000 words. The kind of number you write before you have ever finished the thing underneath it. But an outline lies to you about proportion. The early chapters get twelve careful beats. The later ones get one confident line like "and then everything goes wrong," which turns out to be four chapters and a great deal of shouting.
So I'm at 50,000 words, half of what I planned, and only about 43% of the story. The finish line has moved to roughly 115,000.
My first reaction was not grace. It was standing in my kitchen doing arithmetic I didn't like. But the book isn't longer because I've been sloppy. It's longer because it turned out to have more in it than I could see from the start. That's the good version of this problem. And I am going to finish it. It will take a little longer than I told you, but I am going to finish it.
An hour a day
There is no writing retreat. No cabin. No five-in-the-morning miracle. There is a full-time job and an hour found wherever an hour can be found, a lunch break, the gap after dinner, a quiet Sunday. Some hours give me four hundred words. Some give me forty and a headache. But they stack. Fifty thousand words did not happen on one good day. They happened on about a hundred ordinary ones. Which is why a longer book doesn't frighten me the way it would have a year ago. If the method is an hour at a time, a longer book isn't a crisis. It's just more hours.
A page from the fifty thousand
Here's a piece of what's behind me. This is Saelynn and Kade, early on, before either of them has decided what the other one is. Highlighted in my own messy hand, pink for her, blue for him, the way I mark up every book I love.
I marked it because it's the first time she really doesn't flinch. He reaches for the cruellest thing he knows about her and swings it, and instead of ducking she picks it up and hands it back sharpened. That's the whole engine of these two. It's raw, it's first draft, and it will change. That's rather the point of letting you in this early.
What I read this week
Between the hours at my own desk, I finally read For Whom the Belle Tolls by Jaysea Lynn, and reader, I loved it. It quietly stole an evening I meant to spend being sensible, and I regret nothing. If you want something to fall into while you wait on mine, let it be this one.
The finish line moved
I'd pinned myself to August 30th, and I'm letting that go. Not because I've stopped working, but because I'd rather give you the whole book than a rushed two-thirds of one. I'm writing toward the end of September now, at the same pace that got me here. A deadline you move on purpose is a very different thing from one you miss.
One more thing
The pendants are still multiplying quietly on my desk. When the first draft is done, small giveaways start, pendants included, as a thank you for being here through the messy middle. Nothing to do yet. Being on this list is how you'll hear first.
Your turn
I read every reply, so tell me: what are you in the middle of? Not the finished things. The still-going ones, the ones that turned out bigger than you signed up for and that you're doing anyway. The middle is the hardest part. You don't get through it in a burst. You get through it an hour at a time.
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