T MINUS SIX
The bad news: not much progress yesterday on the word count.

The good news: I spent a lot of time last night straightening out the messy first quarter of the book, and -- once everything was put in the right order -- found that only 200 words or so had to be cut, rather than the 5,000+ I expected.

But at the end of the day, this is not all about word-count. It's about content. Whether I write another 3,000 or 15,000 words in the next five or six days is irrelevent. The goal must be the make those words meaningful, propel the plot, and close the holes in the narrative.

Now that the beginning of the book is roughly in the proper order, I have a better sense of how to clarify the motivations of some characters and jazz up the opening chapters, both of which have been troublesome to me over recent weeks. And that's a very good thing.

And so it continues...