I’m perhaps halfway through a first draft of the novel. That is (currently) about 79,000 words. Fifteen chapters have been completed at the draft level. Other chapters have sketches or outlines, while some are merely a virtual index card. I plan on thirty to thirty-five chapters in total. The number changes often as I add or take away chapters.

This week I broke the month’s hot streak of writing 1000+ words per week to the draft and only added about 725 words. I received feedback from another writing buddy on a chapter that caused me to remove two pages of lovely writing that made my heart ache but… it slowed down the action of the scene. It’s hard for me to take out passages that I loved creating. The pages went into my Deleted Scenes folder. Perhaps the words will live again somewhere else in the draft.

A point of trivia: “kill your darlings” is often attributed to Faulkner, but was introduced earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch in a 1916 book as “murder your darlings”: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it–whole-heartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”