Yesterday I finished the epilogue to Iron Jaw and Hummingbird. I've printed out the manuscript to take with me to the wilds of Vermont today to a writing retreat at Rudyard Kipling's house hosted by Bill Willingham, which he's taken to calling the Ghosts of Clockwork Weekend, since Matt Sturges and Mark Finn will be there as well (along with Lone Star Press's Bill Williams). I'll be doing a final read-through and polish on the manuscript while at the Kipling place, which should be fitting since most of Act I is lifted from Kim.

Iron Jaw came out a bit more than 80K words, of which 20K were written before this year, or 59,227 new words. Taken with the 22,382 new words I wrote for the expansion of Set the Seas on Fire in January, and the 167,245 words of End of the Century written between the end of January and the end of March, that means that I've written 248,854 since the beginning of the year. Considering that in 2005 I wrote 158,985 altogether, and in 2006 I managed 169,800, this is already my most productive year to date. I've been writing full time since last fall, when Georgia started preschool, and it's nice to see I'm actually getting something done.

Okay, next week I write up the proposal for The Pursuit of the Lily Stargazer and dive right into The Dragon's Nine Sons. And, with any luck, in August (after writing a few short stories I owe various editors), I'll be able to start work on Three Unbroken, about which more later.

But really, did you catch that a second ago? I've written a quarter of a million words since the first of the year. Yikes!