176,372 words

I am making progress on Stanton.  I now have 176,372 words written in 18 chapters.  The book is supposed to be 200,000 words long, so that would suggest that I only have another 24,000 words to write.

The reality is that I have more to do than that.  This morning, for example, I am rewriting several chapters to emphasize the relations between Secretary Stanton and General William Tecumseh Sherman.  This will be important in two chapters I have left to write, the chapter on early 1865, when Stanton meets with Sherman to discuss his policy towards blacks, and the chapter on the summer of 1865, when Stanton overrules Sherman’s truce with Johnston.  I need to “go back” a bit so the reader understands that there were tensions between Stanton and Sherman even before early 1865, mainly tensions about Sherman’s refusal to recognize blacks as soldiers.

So I suppose a better way would be to say I have 24,000 words to write and 200,000 to revise.