Vodnik Draft 5 (or 6?) Complete!

Okay, I just emailed my latest draft of Vodnik to Stacy. Right now it clocks in at 98,681 words. The draft before this was 103, 500 (give or take). So that's 5,000 words net cut, but since I probably wrote somewhere around 6,000 new words (maybe more--it stopped being easy to tell how much I'd added), it could have been a lot worse. (In  other words, I was shooting to get it down to 83,000 words. I clearly failed miserably at that. But I didn't *increase* the word count to 110,000 words. That's gotta count for something, right?)

It's strange to look at this draft and compare it to the first draft of the book. There's very little that's remained the same. At what point does a draft become a new book? It's sort of like a computer where you've swapped out the motherboard, graphics card, network card, disc drives, monitor, keyboard, mouse--everything but the case, but you still think of it as the same computer.

At any rate, I'm taking a break today. Going antiquing--looking for a piano bench. Tomorrow, I'll get to work on a Slovak pronunciation guide, author's note, dedication page (that one should be quick, at least), and acknowledgements page. Once that's all done, if I still have time, I suppose I might look at Tarnhelm (my new project) some more, although I fully anticipate Stacy getting back to me with some more changes. My due date is May 1, which seems much closer now than it did back in February.

Oh well. That's it for now. Celebrations are in order, if only of the minor variety for now.