Willow Word Count...10 years later....

[tbonejenkins]

Last night, Scrivener informed me that I had passed the 150K overall word count on Willow. Which made me wonder what the original word count was in the 1st draft. I did some digging and came across this blog post that I did a little over 10 years ago, when I had finished the first draft. 

First Draft Total:

Word Count: 462,257
Chapter Count: 79 and a prologue

Third Draft Total (pending)

Word Count: 151,179 (as of today)
Chapter Count: 44 (firm)

Wowwwwww. That's a pretty dramatic cut. A lot of that was tossing out a bunch of extra storylines, dropping a lot of supporting characters arcs (some will get pushed to the next book if it happens), and simplifying a bunch of things. It's taken me ten years to figure out it. I have to say though, this 3rd draft of Willow is the easiest draft to handle yet. I can actually work with it--I think writing the novella helped me with that. And I now can see the completion of this book looming close. I want to try shooting towards completing it by the end of this year, but we'll see. ^_^

This also makes me want to go back and reread all the older posts I did back when I did more blogging. Man, my writing process has changed soooo much. I've been meaning to go back to more blogging anyway.