I just made progress on Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites! So far I’m 15% complete on the Editing phase.

I don’t talk in specifics about my day job on my blog, but I’ll go so far as to say that I work at a university, and that the university was closed today on account of an ice storm. Thus, I am spending the day sipping bourbon and working on Jake and the Dynamo: Dead to Rites. I am now in the editing phase, making the first pass in preparation to send it to my illustrator.

I’ve mentioned before that my drafts expand as I edit, even though the convention is that a final should be considerably shorter than a rough. There are, however, good reasons for this. First, I tend to write dialogue in staccato fashion, often without attribution. As I make my second pass, I notice when a reader might not know who’s talking, and then I add in attribution along with description of what characters are doing.

Also, in action scenes, my first draft is usually technical description. Only in later drafts do I add things like what characters are thinking and feeling and so forth. My perceptive editor rightly noted, on receiving my submission draft of The Wattage of Justice, that Jake disappeared during action sequences, so I added in a lot more detail about his thoughts and behaviors, which naturally upped the word count. The most dramatic example of this is in Pretty Dynamo’s climactic battle with the demoniac: Originally, this was told as a single paragraph outlining her spear technique, but in the final version, the paragraph was broken into single-sentence paragraphs interspersed with Jake’s reactions, consisting mostly of his indignant ruminations on how little girls have to be humanity’s defenders.

So that’s why my word counts increase in later drafts. I do of course cut out rabbit trails and needless discursions, but those are usually smaller than the added material. Thus, the working draft currently stands at 140,016 words, and will probably be much larger when I’m done (I previously said it was 140,000, but that was rounded up).

Changing subjects—on the review side of things, I’m currently indulging in yet another free month of Netflix (a service I refuse to pay for), which is why I reviewed the second season of Miraculous Ladybug. For my next trick, I will most likely review Little Witch Academia, which I’ve been eager to see for some time. Then I will probably (finally!) get around to the two series of Glitter Force, the execrable localication/butchering of Pretty Cure. Aside from those, Netflix contains little or nothing I give a fig about—which is why I don’t pay for it.