the timeline so far:
- 01 Jan 2011: started draft 1. Expected it to be 120,000 words
- 24 Aug 2011: finished draft 1. 235 days. 169,429 words. 720 words per day.
- break (130 days)
- 01 Jan 2012: started draft 2.
- 03 Aug 2012: finished draft 2. 215 days. 210,000 words. 976 words per day.
- 04 Aug 2012: started draft 3.
- 20 Dec 2012: finished draft 3. 139 days. 274,594 words. 1,975 words per day.
- break (87 days)
- 17 Mar 2013: started draft 4
- 29 May 2013: today. Draft is 22.3% done
As of right now the novels are at 291,266 words.
Some computed statistics:
- added 16,672 words so far in this draft
- … which means I expect to add 74,762 words total
- … which means that the novels should reach around 350,000 words
- i.e. somewhere between 1,000 and 1,400 pages
- At this rate, the expected completion date is around 27 December 2013
- At this rate, the expected project length is 273 days
- I’ve revising 1,282 words per day
Some color commentary:
My daily word rate has dropped a tad from draft 3, but draft 3 was an insane sprint when I thought that the end was in sight. It was also a sprint being performed on a noticeably shorter work.
Even though the break from Christmas to this spring felt like a long time, it wasn’t quite three months.
I’d really been hoping to finish up by 1 October so that I could launch a kickstarter mid-month and ship books for Christmas…but it’s not to be. This story is huger than I had any conception of, and it demands to be done well. The fourth draft needs to be done, and then there might even be a fifth draft.
So.
Screw the “books ship by 31 December 2013” deadline.
I might not finish draft 5 of this thing until October of NEXT year.
Books ship by 31 December 2014. Yes. FOURTEEN.
(fingers crossed)
As a beta-reader for draft 2, can’t wait to see the completed version!
Thank you – that’s very kind!
I think / hope it will be worth the wait.
On the one hand, I’m getting antsy for the books. On the other, the revisions you’ve published are clear improvements over the first draft you published, so I think it’ll be worth the wait.
And your schedule reminds me of the joke the Perl 6 developers have been using for years now: it’ll be done by Christmas, but we don’t know of which year.
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