Tonight I wrote another 628 words on Killing Time, bringing my grand total to 79,617 words. It’s not a lot of progress in the scheme of how much I was making per day during November, but it’s not bad considering.¹

I think I have everything set up, now, for the next several “climactic” scenes, each taking place from a different POV or in a different time frame. Did I mention that Killing Time is a time-travel story set simultaneously in the present; multiple, parallel pasts; and the distant future? Well, it is. And keeping track of all that may prove to be too much for me, but we’ll see if I can pull all the threads together and make the ending a little less unsatisfying. That was one of the big complaints of the people who read it when it was a 12,000-word novelette. Too much exposition (for a 12,000 word story, probably 6,000 of that was exposition. <cringe> Exposition about how time travel works. <double cringe> Yeah. I know. I promise that ratio is much better, now. And the ending was anticlimactic. That was partly by design, and I’m keeping some of that, but adding more detail to clarify why it’s designed that way. Hopefully, my alpha readers will get it.

At least no one died in this scene. That’s a nice change. (No, really, that’s not facetious. I have a truly staggering body count in this one.)

There are between four and eight more scenes left to write, depending on how I feel when I start writing them. I have a lot of loose threads. If each scene is between 2500 and 5500 words long, I’ll crack 100,000 for sure.

Um, yeah. A chapter should be around 2500.

Well, we’ll see. :)

[Note: I’m experimenting with using a photo from Flickr that is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, but I’m not 100% sure exactly how to do that other than what I did, so I apologize heartily if I got it wrong and I will fix it if someone lets me know.]

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1. I have a bad respiratory infection, causing me to cough like mad, and the medicine is making me a little loopy.