Updated May 23, 2008

Work in progress: Is my first women's fiction manuscript. I have a tentative title, but posting it would give away too much about the content. I'm not ready to share that yet.

To recap: I've completed an extremely rough draft, which came in at  97, 563 words.

I'm working on the second draft. I'm guessing the final draft will total about 100,000 words or more so that's my goal. The rough draft was a big purge. After a rough draft I start working on the second draft as if starting a new manuscript. This means I start again with blank pages, only referring to the original version occasionally.

*November 2007 -Mood while writing was: Good. The tally was 35,670  words or 35 percent of my goal of 100,000 words.

*January 2008 -Mood while writing was: Great!  The tally was 50,568 words or 50 percent of my goal of 100,000 words.

* March 2008- Mood while writing was: Good. The tally was 71,484 words of 71 percent of my goal of 100,000 words.

See graphic below for my late May tally:

Mood while writing: Frustrated. I made a little progress on my word count as you can see, but not as much progress as I'd planned. My goal was to finish this second draft, but as I started to wrap up the various plot strands I needed to go back and read what I'd already written. That slowed me down quite a bit. Next time I hope to report that the second draft is DONE.

This progress meter came from a web site called www.writertopia.