Wrote the crap out of this book last night. Got about two scenes further than I'd even hoped for. I just finished most of the major reversals of fortune that you have to expect in any heist-caper book, and it is about to devolve into the big end fight. There was a lot of ground-up rewriting, which actually was faster than trying to pretty up scenes that didn't quite work anymore. The scenes that did work were largely useable with a few cuts.

I'm down to about 112k or 113k. I don't know how much of that will stick, given the amount of stuff that is gonna get radically rewritten, but it sure is a pretty wordcount right now.

We'll see if it's all garbage later, of course, but right now, I'm pretty jazzed. If I can sneak some writing in at lunch (iffy) or over the weekend (iffier), I could potentially be done with this pass next week. More realistically, I think I could potentially be done by the end of January, giving me February and March to collect reader reactions and April and May to do final revisions before I fling this out to lucky publishers and then toss this beautiful work of art to the back of my mind and get started on the next one.

Until late June, anyway. In late June, Dude 2.0 or Dudette 1.0 arrives, and I take a year off from writing. Nothing like a hard deadline to keep one motivated...

Huh. It's been brought to my attention that I'm apparently crap at giving out information. So, for those of you who I totally forgot to tell, the damsel and I are gonna be having another Dude or a first Dudette sometime in late June.

Ahem. I know I hadn't put anything up here, but I thought I'd mentioned it to people I saw in California. Evidently not. I was probably busy explaining the rules for autofire or something and lost track of it. You know, priorities.