August's Writing Progress

I kept up the momentum on The Last Dragonrider, though I didn't write quite as many words this month - 14,000 instead of 17,000, so the total for this book now stands at 47,000. The end of the first draft is in sight (I know I've said that a lot these past few years). It will probably come in a bit shorter than most of my other novels, which are around 100,000 to 120,000 words.

I spent a couple of days writing some little programs that trawl through my 18 years'-worth of backups, to try to figure out my average rate of writing and whether it's changed in that time. The answers are, if you consider it over a long enough interval, (1) about 240 words a day (about the same as one page of a paperback) and (2) no.

The total time to produce a book has gone down, partly because I tend to keep more of the first draft now, and partly because I don't spend as much time editing as I used to. In some of my early books, I wrote a lot of material that I ended up not using, and changed a lot of the material that I did use, because I was still learning how to tell a story, and wasn't so sure of the story I wanted to tell. Sometimes, I'm still not sure of the story I want to tell. See, for instance, Command Authority (except that you can't yet...).