This Week’s Pens | Inks | How Much Novel Progress |
|
Say, that wasn’t much of a week, was it? Oh, but it was busy. You see, this fellow…
…has been going increasingly mad from loneliness since the death of his closest and final chum, Oberon. It’s not that we humans neglect him, but we do not speak his language well. Last weekend, we finally found him some companions. We had been looking for either siblings or a cat that was very friendly to other cats. We ended up finding two of the latter:
They are, as far as anyone knows, not related. But they clearly get on well with other cats. They were, in fact, required to be adopted together by the rescue group whence we got them. The older one is great with cats, but shy with people, and thus was hard to adopt. After he had provided support to the younger during a phase of convalescence from the illness which took his mother and litter-mates (which sounds like Victorian melodrama, but is all too true), the idea of separating them seemed monstrous.
Of course, when brought into our house, they vanished like a dew. I spent part of Sunday convinced that the little fellow had been killed by some unknown hazard in our basement. By last night, though, they were both at least visible, and the big guy has apparently convinced Hercule that no one is going to get eaten by anyone else. Progress toward a happy household.
However… none of this has a lot of bearing on the low word-count. What brings that about is the fact that one of the words typed this week was END, all by itself at the bottom of a page. Very nearly 90,000 words, which is a great deal more than I thought the manuscript ran to and a pretty good number for a novel.
This doesn’t mean I’m done, alas. There’s a little polishing of the whole before it gets put in the hands of feedback providers, then reacting to that feedback, then hiring a professional editor to do some horrible things to my ego… at the end of which I will start sending query letters out. If this seems a timid and over-baked approach… well, yeah, but since it’s the first novel (bar the ones I never even tried to publish) I’d like it as shiny as possible before pestering gate-keepers with it.
It is done enough that I can get on with some other projects, though. Hoorah, hoorah!