Back in the lab.

After sending the manuscript to a young man last night, I was compelled to crack my novel again and start working. I actually got some stuff done today; seems the couple of months time sitting on it allowed me to get far enough away from feeling overwhelmed by what's missing from the whole story that I could address the first chapter by itself. It needs more revision, but the things that I needed to add to flesh it out I think are in; I think I like where the narrative string is at, for the first thirty some pages. I believe I am adding an entire chapter in after that, that doesn't presently exist, but that's ok, too. I'm still trying to get a figure on a ballpark average length for a science fiction novel (in word count). Mostly out of curiosity.

In other news, my kittens are very feisty. They wrestle and fight and maul one another most of the time, when they're not trying to climb things. The also appear to view my feet as one (two?) of their own. I think the solid grey one is going to get pretty big. I still haven't named them.

Addendum!

Cripes, according to the Wikipedia article on wordcount (first thing that popped up in Google), the word counts used for determining categories for the Nebula award classify a novel as anything over 40k. All the way down to short stories you have to keep it under 7.5. That puts the 'short story' that I've been working on the last year and a half well into the 'novelette' range (it's 10k and I have some sections to add). Interesting! I realize it's not a be-all end-all, and from what I understand those counts are pretty low. But. It IS interesting. To me. >.>...

Also, mentions that most Universities limit Ph.D. theses to 100k at a maximum.

!!!

That's a fuckton of writing. I mean, Chant is almost that long, but I made most of Chant up. So. Whatev, man.