Hello, Blogger. I've missed you.

Speaking with Greig Means this weekend (editor and publisher of the excellent Tugboat Press, about which I need to write, I think) it occurred to me that I hadn't been updating this blog much lately. This is for a variety of reasons, none of which need to be gone into here despite the fact that this is a blog and that's usually exactly the kind of thing that is gone into.

Anyway, it occurred to me what I useful tool this blog was when I was writing my novel. I posted my progress every day and if I had no progress, I posted that, too. The knowledge that people were keeping track of those slowly mounting numbers helped to motivate me. I bring this all up because I seem to find myself writing another novel. What I think will become another novel, at least. (My wife's declaration to this bit of news was something like, "Why would you do that?" Indeed.)

I didn't come up with the idea of publicly tracking my progress. In the grand tradition of writers everywhere, I stole the idea from someone more talented and more intelligent than me. Cherie Priest, writer of scary stories and, lately, steampunk novels does just this. I've also noted that just lately, in the last couple of days, Warren Ellis (Ellis's site is very often NSFW) is also tracking his novel-in-progress's growing word count. So I'm in good company, I suppose.

So let me recap, very quickly, my progress so far, starting with the fact that my goal is to write 1,000 words a day.

On Friday, I wrote 1,026 words. Saturday yielded 1,092. On Sunday I had a full day with Oscar up in Portland and I only managed 317 words, but I made up for that by writing 1,683 words tonight which is 2,000 exactly for the last two days. That makes a grand total of 4,118. There. Starting tomorrow, I'll start having a running total at the bottom of each post until I get to end of the first draft.

I suppose I should write just a bit about the first novel, Zomburbia. I finished the second draft and sent it off to three readers. My first reader is going to give it another once-over and two new victims volunteers are also reading it. Soon I will have even more corrections to make, I'm sure, and I'll be able start on a third draft. After that, who knows. Maybe it'll be time to start finding an agent. As much as I'm able, I'll document the whole process here.

Lucky you.