Write-a-thon Week 4 Update

So this is a little late. I was trying to put it off until I had the story I'm working on completed, which I hoped would be Friday. And then Saturday. And even Sunday would have been okay. But here we are on Monday... and, well, where exactly are we?

Here's where: I'm expanding a 600-word story I wrote a month or so ago, which wasn't working at such a short length. I figured another thousand words would flesh it out. But here I am at 3000 words and the end is only barely in sight. It'll be under 4000 words when I'm done, but not by much. Things have been progressing, but slowly, hampered by constant doubt that it needs to be this long.

Then I move on to a story I started several months ago. I wrote a few thousand words of it and stopped, probably because of a suspicion that it was more ambitious than I was willing to tackle at the time. I added a thousand words to it last week, and I'm thinking I still have another few thousand to go. It may actually head into novelette territory, which has frightening "No Man's Land" signs posted at the borders for me.

The other rewrite, planned for Week 6, is for the story I drafted at the beginning of the Write-a-thon. It's getting a major overhaul (which I need to actually think out), so that's another 4000 new words.

So, all in all, we're looking at about 10k in new wordage for this week and next. Gulp. And that would only be getting 5 out of 6 stories done. So ideally I'd also need to pull a piece of flash out of my ass. (Well, it could come out of my brain--but that would effectively be the same thing. Shit either way.)

I'd be in slightly better shape if I hadn't decided to trash the story that I spent three days on the week before last. But it sucked in myriad ways, so it's really better left for dead.