Salvete, amici.

This weekend I hit a rather special milestone on my wordcount, after a handful of weeks of thwarted but still decent progress.

A big moment, fo sho. I’m not quite as jubilant as I ought to be, as while this speed of progress is good, I’ve felt the plot has dragged a little in recent Chapters. The Argo is clear of the Clashing Rocks. Fiiiiinally… this actually became a joke to my close friends, with me sending a new snapshot with every 1k milestone followed by the words ‘and they’re still in the f**king Rocks!’ until about now.

Part II still has a way to go – they’ve got to visit the Isle of *SPOILERS*, where they meet the vestiges of *SPOILERS*, and then disturb a bunch of *SPOILERS*, before *SPOILER* gets *SPOILERED* by a *SPOILER* and *SPOILER* ends up getting *SPOILERED* by the *SPOILERS* in his haste to find *SPOILER*. And there’s a whole final truckload of character spadework to do before we can start Part III.

I’ve rather foolishly set the goalpost of 80k wordcount to finish Part II, with a follow-on goal of 120k to finish the entire novel. I can’t afford to let another novelget stupidly long again (not without jeopardising my chances of getting agent representation, assuming I want to subject myself to another five months of querying masochism like last time). Truth be told, I’m not holding out much hope for hitting either milestone.

But it’s the long weekend, and 70,000 words is no mean feat, so it would be a little churlish not to mark it in some way. I can’t really be arsed to come up with new content (you had a mammoth-sized post off my last month, don’t get precious) but given I’d already aired the Prologue with you some time ago – a Prologue that has, ironically, been rewritten and edited quite heavily since then – perhaps it’s high time y’all get to read a little further. The first actual Chapter.

And I can’t be bothered to look up linking a PDF to WordPress again, so screencaps it is.

Happy Easter, all.

Grim times ahead.