There’s no way we’ll hit our end-of-year word count goal. While it’s not outrageous to think we could each grind out 1,500 words a day every day until the end of the year, it’s just not going to happen. We have visitors coming to stay for the whole week, and there’s no point in having them here if we’re going to ignore them. And anyway, we like them. We want to talk to them, not lock ourselves away in the Writing Cave and leave them to eat cookies by themselves.

But that means that we’re blowing past another deadline, and it’s killing Jen. She’s very wrapped up in this artificial goal that we (read:she) set. And even if we did chain ourselves to our computers and managed to get that 100,000 words by January 1, it would’t really make her happy. Because what Jen really wants is to have the whole first draft done, and since Grandson of Science Novel is shaping up to be more like our usual novels than its predecessor, it’s going to be bigger than that.

So Jen is in a bit of a funk, and Kent wishes there was a way to make it all better. But since he so far has steadfastly refused to work on the time machine, there’s nothing to be done. The new year will come without a finished draft, and we’ll keep plugging away until it’s done.

Next week we should have our Year in Review post. Maybe that will show Jen that we have actually accomplished an awful lot this year and she’ll be able to relax.