The last rewriting for Dragon Queen is now finished and the manuscript will be submitted for editing later this week. A few statistics:

Intended Wordcount: 120k

Actual Wordcount: 204k

Intended hours of effort: 300 hours

Actual hours of effort: more like 500 hours (so about two full months more than it was meant to be)

Number of characters inherited from The Adamantine Palace: 2

Number of  dragons inherited from The Order of the Scales: 1

Number of Adamantine Men: 1

Number of characters inherited from The Warlock’s Shadow: 1

Number of unusually polite assasins: 3

Number of people burned by dragons: lots

Number of times the words lightning and/or rocket appear: 172

Number of times the words flower and/or hippy appears: 4

Number of times I had mis-spelled lightning as lighting before I went through and manually checked every single damned instance: 23

Number of primary human characters: 6

Number of primary human characters who are overtly non-Caucasian: 3

Number of primary human characters who are overtly old: 2

Number of primary human characters who are overtly female: 2

Number of primary human characters who are overtly old, female and non-Caucasian: 1

Number of primary human characters who are revealed as shape-shifting sentient lemons from another world: 0

Number of times the word lemon appears: 2

Number of people disintegrated by the wrath of an angry god: 5

Make of that what you will. I am particularly pleased with this one, but then I think I’ve felt that about every book I’ve finished, so perhaps best not to read too much into that.

Back to working on the edits for The King’s Assassin and the proof of The Black Mausoleum.