21-Day Challenge: Days 15+16

The book didn\’t end up getting finished Monday night. Monday is kid day – and it seems Minecraft (the computer game) has a new patch, one which makes the monsters hit harder and the whole game much more tough. So my three kids and I spent most of the day beating up monsters and building virtual tree-houses together.

Key moment: lightning strikes something, and creates a new monster none of us have seen before – a skeleton horse! One of my kids goes to investigate, but approaching the horse spawns a bunch of skeletons. She dies. We go try to recover her stuff. Lightning strikes the horse a bunch more times, making more skeleton horses… All of which spawn more skeletons as we approach. An epic battle ensues.

Pullquote, in the most deadpan voice a nine year old can attain: \”The skeleton horse apocalypse has begun.\”

Anyway, after kid time was done Liz and I went to the new apartment to get things set up a little there. We had new curtains we wanted to test, and were doing some light cleaning, setting up cleaning supplies, etc. Move in is on Saturday, after all! I got a very little bit of writing done afterwards, but not enough to count. I called it quits, exhausted, to finish in the morning.

Today – Day 16 – I finished the last 1700 words of the book and wrapped it up. Those of you who\’ve been following on the mailing list, your copies of the first draft edition are on their way to you tonight! Enjoy. 🙂

The finish ended up being 54,821 words. About the 55k I thought I was going to end up with. Now the question is, how long will it be after I am done with the edits and cleanup? Am I going to make the 60k I was shooting for? I\’ve started a first run through the manuscript, and have added another 300 words today. Not a great start for editing 5 out of 43 chapters, but there\’s still a lot of story to go through. We\’ll have to see how it goes.