It’s been a while since I gave you a progress report on my work so far. If I remember correctly, it was on August 31st and it was around 73k words. So here’s how much I’ve written so far: 94500 words. It’s clear now that I will exceed my originally planned word limit. The good news is that the first 10 chapters will have to be condensed into 2 or maybe 3. There are 2 scenes with dream-like memories in them where we learn a few things about the main character but they will be placed between later chapters. A daunting effort, no doubt. “Murder your darlings” is the saying, right? Well, I’ll show them 😛 The reason for such a huge need to remove so many chapters is that my inciting moment takes place at chapter 10. It was a great blunder I made, as I tried to set the character, his relation to the rest of the world (which amounts to one and only family) and, the most important for the story as I saw it then, to show the fear the survivors of the Darkening experience and how the main character experiences it. I think I over did it… Alas, we can only learn from our mistakes. I just hope that when those  revisions and edits, the result will be a less boring story for the reader (the things we do for you, dead reader, lol) without failing to show the ever-present dangers the survivors have to face.

Heat has dropped considerably here in Greece and I can once again use the PC for a few hours. Slowly, but steadily I’m getting back to reaching my old word limit of 2000 words per day. I started by getting into the habit of writing 1500 words daily but the past couple of days I was able to write 2000 words in matter of 3 hours, so that’s good news. If everything goes as planned, I will have completed the first draft by November, at which point I will put it away and not think about it for at least 1 month, if not 2. Then I’ll roll my sleeves and get it edited, hopefully with a beta-reader (that’s another problem I will have to tackle – to find beta readers).

Finally, as you may have seen already, I made some changes to the blog’s layout today. New theme, deleted a page (removed the one about the ideas) and corrected the goodreads widget. Comment below if you can’t find something or if I forgot to add a widget from the old theme or just to tell me if you like the new layout.