Had a fun debate with myself about where to stop Hunting Midnight Episode 4 and start Episode 5. Today, I hit a point where I recognized that I’d be sailing well over my hazy wordcount target for #4 and needed to take a step back and consider what sort of high level rhythm and style I wanted.

The notion that each episode should have an identifiable goal came back, and helped guide me to a tentative decision: I’d backtrack and cut the episode off 5,000 words earlier in the writing once I figured out how to massage the events in the now dangling 5K into a fresh plotline for Ep5 (else, Ep4 was going to need to be in the 30,000+ range in order to contain a proper story shape, in my opinion).

Intending to sleep on it, I instead spawned some 900 words worth of notes to myself and think I’ve wrangled enough #5’s plot to feel comfy saying that #4 is actually DONE now. Needs polish in order to make it out of this sudden surgery without complication, but that’s kinda cool, yea? This decision also upped my final episode count for the season to nine, and a total wordcount prediction of a quarter million words.

I fretted over the feasibility of publishing a paperback’d season of that monstrous length… but then checked and saw that Harry Potter’s Order of the Phoenix is 257,000 words long (good lord) so that diminished any concern about the physical limitations, heh.

Oh, and actual fiction words today = 1,262