...And it is already time for my monthly project update.
This might actually be the first update post in a long time where I've been able to give easy to see, measurable progress.
As I have continued to work on The Wolf and the Sheath this month, I've done a lot of, what seems to me, small editing and rewrites: fix a sentence here, delete extraneous words there, write a short scene. Any given night I haven't done a lot, or made what I would call major changes. I think the largest amount of new material I've written in any one sitting is only about 700 words.
I've made... well, maybe not a LOT of progress, given that I wrote the bulk of this novel-to-be in 1 month... but at least progress that actually looks like progress this month.
It didn't occur to me at any point recently that I should make a note of exactly how many pages, exactly how many words I had in the novel. I wasn't actually thinking I'd get around to writing anything new this month. I had made a very detailed breakdown of the order of what I had already written, to see if anything needed to move, to see where the climaxes of different plot threads were in conjunction to each other, and, most importantly, to see what that uncovered that still needs to be written. After doing that, mostly to get my head out of the outline and back into the story, I started doing a reread. And I thought, "well, while I'm here, I know this needs to change. And this word doesn't work. And now that I know the character better, I think she would say this differently." And somewhere along the line, my 49,000-ish word, 81 page novel jumped to 85 pages and 51,800 words.
I know that just doing the math there, it looks like I've written 4 pages. My actual word count on new material (that I can find, 'cause sometimes I'd write a sentence or two here or there in the narrative, rather than writing a scene in a separate document and inserting it later) is 1,937 words*. Both of those numbers are actually a bit misleading, 'cause I was also cutting as I was rereading and writing new material.
*Admittedly, this is longer than my longest published short story.
But the cuts I've made and the scenes I've added are good changes and good additions. It may not look like a lot, but sometimes less is more.