I'm going to be taking a brief vacation for the next few days. (I've done this before, although maybe not every year.)
The middle-of-the-night writing has been going great—it's a lovely time of day to write, and I'm stormin' right along. I've gotten 6,500 good new words added to the draft about my son's birth just in the last nine days. My plan is to draft the whole story in about 65k words, and then let successive rewrites take it up to 90k words. So that means I've written more than a tenth of the whole first draft just this week.
(I tend to add words in revisions. Old story about D. H. Lawrence—his publisher once sent a manuscript back to him demanding that he cut 30k words. Months later, Lawrence returned the manuscript, and it was 60k words longer.)
I'll aim to return this coming Sunday Monday with the completed "Dogs" Baker's Dozen, and we'll resume from there. Have a great week, and I'll be back before you know it!
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
A good tribute to Butters is the Bakers Dozen of dogs.
Remember this truth: there is only one best dog in the world and every kid has it.
Posted by: Daniel | Wednesday, 25 June 2025 at 06:49 AM
RE: Your "Baker's Dozen": Why make your selection process more difficult than necessary? You made the "rules," so you can break them. Sure, you may catch hell from your editor, but a week from now he will have forgotten all about it and be on to his next obsession. Publish however many you want in as many "parts" as you want (a dozen images per part perhaps?) and be done with it.
Posted by: Gordon Lewis | Monday, 30 June 2025 at 03:26 PM