Time to change the title of these posts – “73 days to a novel” wasn’t even accurate!

So tomorrow is the big day when I cross the 50% mark on the first draft of Dark Heart. Champagne of the cheapest variety shall be consumed, I can tell you that now.

But tonight I narrowly avoided a heart attack when I discovered my work from this morning had vanished completely – gone in a puff of zeros and ones. It’s a mystery, and possibly a bug in Scrivener (the Mac-only writing app I use), but having discussed it at some length with the developer, neither of us can replicate the data loss, so I may have to put it down to the Malign Influence of Soussan-Pannan. Trust me, he’s a nasty one.

All of which got me thinking about word counts, and earlier in the day I was listening to a podcast from Mur Lafferty from January (hey, I’m behind!), in which she broke down her goals for the year. Now, I have a long-term plan, but when the year was divided up by word count, the results surprised me.

So here’s how my year looks:

I write 1600 words a day. As of tomorrow there are 304 days left in 2009, which means I should write, in theory, 486,400 words by December 31st. Good lord, that’s a large number (which makes Zoe’s miscalculation of The Master’s career wordcount in The Mind Robber episode 5 even more amusing… but I digress).

I’ve got 50,594 words left to go on Dark Heart, which leaves 435,806 words. If I estimate 50,000 words writing the second draft of that book (total length still 100,000, but allowing for a 50% rewrite on average), I can allocate 100,000 words to Power, my superhero novel, and another 100,000 to the sequel to Dark Heart.

Phew! 185,806 words left to play with. So 50,000 each for second drafts of Power and Dark Heart II, and then rounding the year off with a shorter novel of 85,000 words – still at the very early stages, but I’ve got an idea for a Children of the Stones/The Weirdstone of Brisingamen-style magical young adult novel, which would be ideal for that sort of length.

That leaves me with change of 806 words, plus whatever I can scrape back from the second drafts of Dark Heart, Power and Dark Heart II.

To be honest, that’s pretty staggering. At just 1600 words a day, I’ll have four novels done, three of which will be at second draft and one will be at first. The Generalissimo, Scott Sigler, is planning on writing 1 million words this year, which is 2740 a day. While I can’t match that, 2009 should still be a very good year indeed.