I finished the first draft and took it to a developmental editor. She was very supportive of the story. She said it was interesting and did not contain any continuity errors. Then she said this character needs more development, and that plot line needs to have more meaning, and this loose end needs explanation, and there needs to be more description of people and places, and…

Well you get the idea. I’ve got a lot more work ahead of me. So I wrote 2k more words today – all of it character development. Tomorrow I will use this new character development to weave that plot line more firmly into the story. As H. Beam Piper once wrote, if you have enough problems you can use them to solve each other. I hope you can all be patient while I clean up these issues and get a second draft together.

So word count at 74.1k now. Wow.