Not Lu here: I’ve finally got some good news… I think. In the last update, I told you that Justan had run into some snags which had him writing a lot of words, but not finishing the book. He also had some problems with where the characters were and how their story was progressing. Well, he thinks he’s resolved both problems. The problem for me is that the little bastard isn’t a good judge of what it means to solve a problem. As you can see below, I’m pretty sure the problem is he’s been gaming too much and writing too little.
Nevertheless, I’m going to give you his update (and hope he’s not lying to me). So, he now has every character up to the 80% point of the book. It took him a lot of time to figure out Sybil and Loy’s stories. Cough. Cough. Can you say gaming? Poor Sybil, she never gets enough attention from Justan.
He also told me that he has a rough outline of what needs to happen with every character by the end of the book. Of course, that “outline” is only in his head, because as you might know, Justan just starts writing and lets each character go where they want and hopes that they all do what is necessary to advance the story. So, we’ll just have to wait and see if he really is close to finishing or if he gets “stuck” (aka gaming) again.
He now just has to push through and get every character to the finish line.
As far as word count goes, he’s got 450,000 words written in the official document plus tens of thousands in the “might be used” folders. This led me to ask if the book was going to be 600,000 words. His response (as always) was a murky jumble of nonsense that basically said, “I still think it’ll only be 500,000 words because even though the last chapter I just wrote was 40,000 words and I still probably have 100,000 or 150,000 words left to write I’ll probably have to take a lot of the words out of the 450,000 in the official document, but I know that I’m definitely keeping 300,000 of those words because I’ve rewritten them a couple of times, so yeah, about 500,000 words.”
I don’t think he can do math. Or speak in small sentences. Or even write small sentences. Good thing we all like long books and long sentences… and hate math.
As far as betting goes, I’m taking the over 500,000 words odds. Yep, it’ll be five or six books in one. Good thing we’re all readers who never want the story to end… but we do want Justan to finish the damn book!
So, the short story is. He’s about 80% done with the first draft. He’s also given me a reasonable date that he thinks he’ll be done.
Unfortunately, he’s really bad at estimating as evidenced by the fact that this draft is now a year late. Where does that leave all of us? In the same place we were before. Waiting. All I can say is IT BETTER BE WORTH THE WAIT!
