let's go around the table

Completed Sunday, December 04, 2005: 179 pages. 36, 293 words. 32 chapters.

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, a novella in four parts and an epilogue.

Completed Friday, February 24, 2006: 201 pages. 38, 669 words. Still 32 chapters.

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, still a novella in four parts, but now with a prologue, interludes, and one whole new character-well, partially. It's someone who's mentioned in most of the previous versions but we've never "seen" them before.

I might be dismayed that I'm still more than a thousand words shy of a novel, but I choose to see it as reinforcement that I'm not padding the story out just to meet a word count. Everything I've added I've added for one reason and one reason only: Because I saw it.

Besides, this is a process, and as long as I keep discovering things that tell me about Keitha and Colley and Annabel, it's an ongoing process that I'm committed to. (Yeah, like I have a choice.)

And I kind of knew this was going to have to go through the old Microsoft Word at least one more time.

I also cut a few lines, and the entire epilogue from the last version, on the grounds of what was I thinking?

I'll be asking some of you to read the new draft soon, so now's the time to check that your spam filters are in place.