Finally Better!

          Bleh. That cold was horrible. Even after I was finally better, I still spent the next week feeling tired for no good reason. Fortunately, my strength is back now. I've even started writing again (though I have not managed a thousand words in a day yet). However, despite February being so miserable, I did manage to finish some significant things accomplished.
          First off, during February as a whole I got about 13,000 words written. Considering the tendinitis and then getting seriously sick, that still means that I was writing whenever I could. I have reached 44,000 words and even hit page 100. Since the first novel only got to 175 pages on the rough draft, I can say that I'm more than half way through this novel. I'd say I'm probably approaching the 60% mark. My characters who had split off to go their different ways have found each other again and the story is progressing quite well.
          One thing that is making this novel a bit more difficult to write is that this novel originally was plotted more as a travelogue than anything else. Now the story seems to be coming together as a lot more than that. It means that I'm finding some parts that hardly get mentioned and that some places end up seeing a lot more care put to them than they received in the outline. It's pretty awesome though.
          I think I have another 30k to finish up this rough draft, which means that if I dedicated March to finishing it, I could conceivably finish this month, though most likely it will be finished the first week of April.
          I will say that half a month of not writing has been good for my reading. I'm read 30 books this year so far. According to Goodreads, that's 13 ahead of where I need to be. I'm glad for the extra though, It means that when I have weeks of no reading (or an insanely long book), I'll have a bit of a cushion to rely on. The full list is below if you're interested.