some interesting stats: I did the adjusted word count by taking all the guide words out. Actual adjusted word count: 86,800. This is as about as accurate as I can get it. So, then if I want the book to have 100k, I’ll have 13,200 words to work with during the rewrite. That is if I need to expand the conflict and other aspects of the story. This gives me lots of wiggle room to work in. The other interesting stats are the line and dialogue line count. I have 9219 lines in the story, so far. Out of those, 5,136 of these are dialogue lines. At a glance this breaks down to a 1-1 ratio. I have way to o much talking going on. And imo too much talking bogs down the story. The surprising stat that I like in all of this is that when I break down dialogue by Beginning, middle and end, there is more there is less talking in the Beginning and end and most of the talking takes place during the middle. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

The other stats I’m considering is, which character talks the most? Since the characters are by order of importance: Paul, his brother Bill, Villain: Candice, Donna, her sister Stacy. These are the prime characters in the story. However, only Paul, Bill, Candice get actual Point of view shift changes in the story. These are flagged right up front for the reader. The other characters are: Fred, Hamilton, Peterson, Paul and Bill’s mother. Out of the 5 main characters I think it would be an interesting study to see who does most of the talking and where. I can do that when I take on the first rewrote. When I write the next novel IBA, I’m thinking of tagging dialogue lines and color-code them but only for the main characters.

We were in bed by 2:40am listening to a bit of Coast. It was a decent show last night even though the first half Art goes on about his global warming scare. That’s when I turned it off. Because of that 5pm nap I had earlier sleep was hard to come by. I think I got maybe 2 hours sleep and I got up around 5:30am to do the cbi thing. After that it was a parade of cats that jumped on my feet all morning waking me up. Tonight Anne can sleep on my side of the bed to see how she likes it.

This afternoon I’m going in at my later time for the 5pm shift. Because Raw is on for 3 hours tonight it still starts at 10pm but over at 12:30am. I’m sure I’m going to miss some of it. Anne hadn’t checked the mail yet to see if her ID came in. She’s been in and out of here since noon so maybe she did and her ID is in but I have my doubts. .

That’s all for now.

e. Jim