A few days ago I decided to go to the works-in-progress page on this site and update where I stand on In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. It was September 1st, to be exact. I checked the word count, then went to the web page. To my surprise, I had last updated it on August 2nd. Here’s the comparison:

August 2nd: 26400 words
September 1st: 53,400 words
Total words written in one month: 26,400

I was surprised. I knew I was making progress in August, going to The Dungeon as often as possible and writing, doing some outlining, even re-reading and improving parts previously written. But to have added that many words—essentially doubling the amount written—in one month, was a surprise. If I can keep up that kind of progress in September, I’ll be at just short of 80,000 words, and be within 5,000 words or so of finishing.

Of course, these aren’t polished, final words. The first 21,000 are close to polished. Those are the ones I sent to the agent on July 13, and I’d read and reread them, correcting all errors I saw, making sure of my plot consistency, worrying about and attending to all the things that could cause her to say, “Ehh, this book and this author aren’t quite ready.” So when I get those last 30,000 words added, I’ll have a couple of readings of it to do self-editing.

My wife is reading it now, only three chapters behind me. She’s marking it up with anything that doesn’t ring true to her. I’ve looked at a few of her pages. She’s marking typos and anything which seems to need explanation or that seems wrong. For example, my protagonist, the star baseball pitcher, changes a flat tire on the car that three young women parked near Wrigley Field. The three women kiss him afterwards, the first two on the lips, the third one on the cheek. But, the way I described it, I had the woman turn her head. That would be wrong if she initiated the kiss. So she’s helping me work through things like that.

Since the end of August, I’ve had little time to work on the book; in fact, just the last two evenings. Yet, despite the limited time, I added over 3,200 words and the manuscript now stands at 56,323 words. That’s incredibly good progress for limited writing time, and I’m encouraged by it. I’m at a point in the book where I haven’t outlined, though I’ve thought some things through. I have the ending fairly well in my mind, but not the in between portions. If I can maintain 5,000 words a week (actually, I’d like to do 6,000 per week), I’ll be done in the first half of October, and ready for edits.