I finished up a rough draft of my work-in-progress. I wound up wrapping it up at around 6300 words, though I may expand it a bit on the next draft. I added a scene looking for a particular piece of evidence, and discovered that the character addition from earlier shortened that scene considerably.

Now comes the hard part: setting it aside. I need to be able to come to it fresh for the next draft so that I can get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. This means that I need to find something else to work on. At this point I don’t have any other ideas for something new, so I think that editing an older piece makes sense. I’ve been tempted lately to go back to the first piece I wrote last year, Where Do They Bury the Survivors? and look into an idea I had to expand it to novel length. Looking at it more clearly now, I think that it really fell down in terms of motive: only one suspect, the murderer, had an obvious motive to kill Lt. Tou. I thought that it would work given that it was meant to look like an accident, but nobody really ever believes that in a mystery story, do they? So I had an idea for a subplot that would cast doubt on one of the other characters pretty effectively — but it could well add another 10,000 words, depending on how I do it.