Writing by Number, Part II

Are you the type of writer who measures progress through word counts? If so, here’s today’s question: how do you measure your progress in the second draft?

I first explored the metrics of writing in this post, but I was thinking of first drafts as I wrote it.

It’s easy to measure progress on your first draft. The manuscript was x words long at the end of yesterday, and y words long at the end of today; therefore, today’s word count is y – x. Any word processor can count those for you. There a...