I just finished the first draft of that critical scene that has vexxed me for so long.  Upon reading back through it, I’m happy with it on first glance.  I’m sure I’ll tweak it a little here and there, but it’s exponentially farther than I’ve been up to this point.

The scene ran quite long, and I’m going to push the epilogue to a final, 10th chapter.  I just felt I would have to rush the ending to keep it even close to the same word count of all the rest of the chapters ( high 4k – mid 5k words per )

Not to worry, my plan is to put out those shorter than average chapters at two per week.  Unedited, the nine chapters currently add up to 48,662 words.  So, it’s going to be in the 52k words range or so, depending upon how long those epilogue scenes end up being.  There are a lot of happy endings to get in there *laugh*

Oh, come on.  It’s not that much of a spoiler.  I don’t write unhappy endings unless it’s a horror story.  =P

Once I’ve finalized the complete first draft of the story, I’ll announce it here, there, and everywhere LOL  I’m holding off on Twitter and Facebook for now, because I felt as if I cried wolf the last time, when that critical scene petered out on me again the last time I thought I had it.

After finishing the first draft, I’ll give it at least a couple of days to simmer before I begin the full read through to check for pacing, continuity, etc.  The first five chapters or so have had this done to them dozens of times, though.  Doubt they’ll need any tweaking.

After I finish the read, I’ll jump straight into the first pass edit of Ch. 01, and get it off to Roust for final editing.  At that point, I’ll be poking around at Literotica to see what the average posting lag is, in order to aim for a good start date ( Thursday or Friday posting )

Once I have a bead on that, I’ll announce when it will be going in the queue, along with the expected release date.  The rest of the chapters will go through the editing process one after the other, so the whole story should be edited and ready to go within two weeks of finalizing the first draft.

Damn, this feels good.  I’ve been fighting this story for so bloody long.

EDIT: ( a little later ) I’m already 1300 words into the Ch. 10 Epilogue.  Probably won’t get anything done tomorrow, because I’m going to cut out of work early, grab new cartridges for my printer, and watch IRON MAN!