Goal Schedule/Rewrite Stats

I went back to one of the first posts of the blog and was startled to find that my original timeline called for the first rewrite to start 08 January 08. The rewrite actually started 14 Jan. Not bad.

It also called for a 15 February goal of finishing the rewrite and 22 Feb for sending the manuscript off to family and friends. Upon further review I see no reason to change that, and it would fit well with my recurrent training which will start 21 Feb. So far so good.

So I started the rewrite today and got to page 13 out of 718 (as currently formatted) in about 4 hours. Using those numbers as a rough guide, I will need about 200 hours for the rewrite, which calls for about 6 hours a day of rewriting.

Gulp.

Its hard to imagine that happening in a part time scenario with my policy of not working at home. Dang.

Further stats:

The first draft finished at 205,900 words. After the first 13 pages or so of editing the 2.0 draft stands at 203,900. The shrinkage rate will probably decrease as I go because I think I got better as I went in the writing of the first draft.

Stephen King in On Writing says that his first draft usually shrinks by 10% or so on edit. Using that guideline the book should finalize around 185,000. Still quite long based on blog postings by literary agents, but that's another worry.

Getting back to the goal schedule, the original timeline called for novel complete by 31 March and the first batch of query letters posted on 01 April. That would fit well, as it turns out, for my 01 April vacation and a second week of April school that I may be attending.

I'm just going to have to hit it very, very hard and make those goals.