Couldn't go to sleep late last night, so from midnight to 3am I added another 1000 words to the 3,000 I had done earlier in the day.
Today I got up as early as possible and went six hours (3500 more) before having to attend a family church function. Back at it tonight, I added 2000 more, giving me 5500 for the day, which I find--as always--to be the outer limits of my endurance.
The chapter now stands at 9500 and I'm just finishing the third of seven planned sections, so I'm estimating that my original target of 5,000 total words is . . . OBW [overtaken by words ;-)]. I'm now guessing this will weigh in somewhere north of 20,000, meaning my first two parts will probably ring in at 65,000 instead of the planned 30,000, but I'm not worried, because I think my "realignment" chapters will each ring in at about 10,000 words, meaning 65k + 60 gets me 125k. Let me have 5k for a chapter on super-empowered individuals and 15k for my How to Become a Grand Strategist minimum opus, and then I'll kill the conclusion in 3-4k and bang out an Intro to the whole book that's no more than a long op-ed and Bob's your uncle--I'm in at 150k, absent the associated front and back matter.
Assuming Mark torches a solid 25k and has me add back in a new 15k, that would give me 10k for footnotes and associated matter and I'm in at my expected weight (roughly the size of both PNM and BFA)--big but accessible in tone and reasonably easy to read.
I'm enjoying writing the American history chapter a lot. Finishing with the American Civil War and Western aftermath right now. Then on to the big man. The King Kong. The smartest, toughest, rootingest tootingest cowboy who ever sat in the Oval Office. Yes, I'm talking about Warren Harding. God's gift to the woman voters of 1920!
Made you look!
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