Ding! Round one is over.

I promise this is my last post today.

I just finished the first set of revisions to Stag in Velvet. All the major problems have been sorted out, although I'm sure I'll see new problems when I come back to reread it in a few months. But for now, I'm happy with it.

I ended up writing a short final chapter to wrap up a few things--only about 1,000 words, but that means the final word count is about 133,500. That is a long honkin novel. I'm hoping I'll be able to do some serious trimming on the next round of revisions. Then again, it's the most ambitious and involved novel I've written; maybe it just needs all those words.

I'm sad to be leaving those characters behind, even for a while. I absolutely adore them. But I've got ideas churning for the next book already, and I'm sure that I'll start sketching it out soon enough. For now, my writing schedule stands thusly: write the short story I'm thinking about; finish White Rose; write Charmed Circle for NaNo 2008. That's hardly 100,000 words all told, even if White Rose turns out to be pretty long (which it may--it's an Epic Fantasy in the corny tradition). For someone who just wrote a big chunk of a 133,000 word novel in about a month, 100,000 words in six months is NOTHING.