February 12th – 135,483 words.

Half eleven this morning and I’m stopping writing for the day, with 2,923 words done. That includes the time out for me to go back to the opticians and get my new specs adjusted. They were rubbing on the back of my ear, but it only took a couple of minutes to fix. I could have written on, but I’m approaching the climactic scene for this book and I want to try and write that in one go tomorrow, which might take some doing given the schedule for the day on other things.

Getting used to the new specs is taking its’ time. Having a special pair for when I’m sitting here and having to change them before I get up is taking some getting used to – three times now I’ve found myself halfway down the stairs wondering why everything seems a bit fuzzy before I’ve remembered, halted my headlong dash and returned to my desk to swap back to my proper varifocals. Ah, well we’ll see how it goes, but I need to give it more than 24 hours to find out.

This story looks like it’s going to come out at a nice sort of length – but I can’t decide whether there’s enough unused material, enough loose ends to tie up in an extra few thousand words or make it a sequel. Given my track record, it’ll be a sequel, no doubt, but I’m not sure I’m not stretching the plot premise too far that way.

Still, that’s not the urgent thing, after tomorrow I intend to get back to my Steampunk story , I’ve got two writing groups coming up around the end of the month, and I want to take this to both to get comments about the voice before I launch into it in earnest. The first group submission date for that is Friday, so that has to be the next project to get my attention.