I wrote 3000 words today.

Exactly 3000 words.

I'm going to bed now, but I'm less than 1000 from hitting 60,000 words. I have 21 more scenes to write. I think I have a chance of actually finishing this one soon.

But now... sleep for a few hours!

I have been suffering for hours with one of the worse headaches I've had in a long time. Normally I can just work around them. This one kept me in bed. I finally forced myself up and crawled back here. I looked out the back window. And there it was again...

A big brown chicken.

This wasn't the first time I had seen a big brown chicken wandering around the neighborhood. I called for Russ. Once again, by the time he arrived, the big brown chicken had disappeared.

He just sort of patted me on the shoulder, mumbled something about headaches, and asked about feeding the cats.

I took my camera and went outside. And I couldn't find the big damn brown chicken. I did find that my nice peonys were starting to bloom. I took a couple pictures. And turned to go back inside.

And there it was, standing in the neighbor's driveway, taunting me. I pulled up the camera. It darted into the shadows. I stalked. (So, by the way, did my largest stray cat... but as soon as Russ shook the food and poured some out, he decided that was far easier to catch...)

I have pictures. Big brown neighborhood chicken creature.

Thunk. 5:30am. Still another 24 pages to go through on the changes, but it's basically there. Added just over 2000 words, even when I cut about 3000... which means I wrote about 5,000 total today. Too bad I can only count the 2000. (grin) Ah well. At least I think I finally have this story pointed in the right direction.

I would like to have it done. I rather hope to reach that point by the end of this weekend, but I can't guarantee it.

Tired now. Time to sleep....

Just done with the rewrite gathering at Forward Motion. It went for an hour and a half, and I think a lot of the people found some help there. Now if they would just come and do this rewrite for me...

(grin)

Russ isn't home from his meeting yet. I hope he makes it soon. I'm getting a bit hungry, and I think I'll work better after food. So, it's time for a bit of a break and then on to other things...

The rewrite still seems to be going well, by the way. I hope it works this time.

Reworking over 100 pages to take out the references to this incident and correct the weakness it left for the characters is not easy. It's working out, but slowly. I like the story better for it, though, so I guess I've made the right decision. Or maybe at this point any change looks better than what it was.

Cutting, reworking, adding new... I'm still getting a positve word count, which amuses me at this point. It's going to take all of today and maybe a day or two more to get this stuff reworked, but after that I can go on through to the end of the novel. Yes, people, I can finally actually see the end of this novel in sight!

The funny thing is that I'm really looking forward to doing book 4. I've every reason to believe that it'll be a lot easier to deal with. Five... Well, I'm setting stuff up for five in this novel, so it's going to fall together a little better in this round. Six... what is six? Ah! Yes... well when I get to that point I think I'll have a better grasp of how this falls together. I hope.

Just make it through #3 first. Stop worrying about the ones that come after it.

Why didn't I just write short stories, huh?