I'd rather see my city elect the Lauraist as Mayor than see Question 1 pass in Maine.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if you're a voter in Maine, GO VOTE NO.

One of the things that was clearly wrong with the book as it stood was that it got started much too slowly. So, I pretty much scrapped the opening and wrote a fresh version that kicked things into gear a lot more quickly. For example, Heike no longer has to drive down to Chicago to get the Ark; it shows up at her door via UPS. (Actually, I need to check and make sure UPS is plausible and it wouldn't necessarily be the USPS or FedEx.)

Yesterday was fabulously productive; I wrote 3,000 words.

Today was less so. I sat down to at least poke at it a little and was going to knock off for the day with a token effort; then I checked to see how many words I'd written and it was 97. That was only three words short of 100, so I went back to add at least a few more, and wound up writing 443 total for the day. Since that's only 57 words short of my standard daily minimum goal when I'm being self-disciplined, I suppose I should go back and keep working, but I've reached the end of a scene and the new scene is going to require a bunch of rewriting instead of writing fresh, although when I look at it tomorrow I may decide it needs to be written fresh, too. We'll see.

I'm 5,871 words / 21 pages into the new version of the novel, and it currently stands at 92,410 words total.