Novel Progress: Christmas Greetings

Merry Christmas (for yesterday) and a happy New Year... and all that bullshit. We don't celebrate Christmas all that vigorously in my household, and given some of personal factors, including the illness of family members - 2007 has been especially low-key. Pretty much nonexistent. Just another day.

I decided to use Christmas Day to continue belting the first draft of the novel into shape - Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day are more or less the only real holidays I will get off over the next few months. The occasional public holiday here and there, but that's about it. Sure, I do get a couple of weekends to myself per month, where I don't get dragged into my real job on a Saturday or Sunday, but with so many things to do in the space of a normal weekend, my writing seems to get somewhat neglected.

Anyway. No real progress on any short fiction since my last update. I did start toying with an old fantasy/sci-fi/post apocalyptic short story for a few hours, however I decided to leave it on the backburner for the moment and concentrate on the novel.

The novel is around the 45000 word mark at the moment - it's on the cusp of being a long novella, or a short novel. With additional editing, fleshing-out ideas and spot-welding, it will definitely fall on the side of a short novel. 50000 - 60000 words as an estimate. Word count isn't all that important, as long as you have used as many words as necessary to tell your story.