My current goal for Derelict is to finish it by year’s end. Not just “I have a complete draft,” but “I have a complete draft that has been through several revisions and is now in good enough shape for me to start submissions while working on my next book.”
In some ways, I’m scarily close. 90K words written, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve basically hashed out the ending — which has been the main hang-up for the last, oh, year or so. Of course the ending I’m going with means that most of the beginning, after first couple of chapters, gets to be yanked out and sent to the chop shop, where any usable parts will be sold to the highest-bidding chapters. But I digress.
It is worth noting that, in other ways, I am scarily not close. Most of the book is going to receive a pretty harsh shuffling; there will be many casualties among the scenes currently written, a lot of stuff needs to be rewritten, and some things I’ll just have to see when I get there. I think four months will do the trick, though.