Day 31 wound up just being the 6,088 words, because I didn't get around to filling in the placeholders. (The "just" in this instance referring to the amount not changing, not that 6k+ wasn't a productive day.)
The delay mostly came down to the fact I still had to do that crit partner stuff, which ate a bit of time, and then I was exhausted so I needed a short nap (actually, I needed a long one, but just took a short one).
Rather than trying to fill in those gaps right now, I'm thinking I'll just take care of it when I do my continuity read / proof (and maybe not spend as much time trying to polish other elements to save time). The placeholders are a bit harder than usual since it's a multi-POV, so I really need to review the earlier chapters just to see what would work in context.
So ultimately I fell kinda just short (or maybe slightly short on a technicality) of finishing the first drafts for 8 novels since coming back to fiction writing last November. And, honestly, other than one character detail I need to fill in, what I have now could pass for the full book since I can get around the "placeholder chapter" by rearranging my chapters and the "incomplete" POV chapter was more just I wanted to make it longer (since it'd already touched on the important parts, but it was on the short side). idk, I hesitate to call it a "finished" first draft, but it effectively is a finished first draft.
That said, the revisions for this one are going to be rough. The final section -- including everything I wrote today -- will likely need heavy revision, particularly since the epilogue's tone doesn't feel consistent with the rest of the book. (And the last chapter is essentially an epilogue because the final confrontation has an abrupt conclusion.)
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Woolly -- Grats on the 1k
CMBright -- Grats on the almost 5k
I'm currently looking at what could be moved to book 2 as the scenes have a purpose. Condensing only culls so much.
tbh, I've done something similar to that a few time. When I was going to run long on one of my books, I finally decided to just handle an entire arc in the sequel. And another book I realized I had a lot of dialogue, etc, setting up the future books *after* the main threat had already been resolved, so I wound up deciding to just add an extra book to the roadmap to cover that and other loose plot points.
And I'm almost certainly going to run into the issue with not being able to condense enough in my first novel. A few things would actually make more sense in the sequel; for example, book 2's antagonist first appears in book 1, but right now he reveals major plot points and his plan is only possible as a result of book 1's events (that and intro'ing him in book 2 would make book 2's first twist even more obvious). However, right now it's 102k words and needs to get down to 70-80k, if not less, since it's YA and it's an auto-pass from a lot of agents just given the length.