So remember the fear that I wasn't gonna make my goal word count and would fall horribly short? It turns out to be founded, and much more drastically than I even feared.
My current word count is 50,374. I have...maybe half of one chapter left to write, and then there is no more book left. Unless there are entire half-finished chapters I've overlooked somewhere (which is not out of the realm of possibility...223 pages is a lot to keep track of), I'm probably not going to break 52,000. And suddenly all those solutions I've placated myself with seem to suck really badly. There's a lot of exposition in the book, but if I used exposition, there was a reason -- usually because the scene of it would be boring, I needed to pass a very large chunk of time, or I didn't think I could write it effectively (frequently a combination of these reasons). I am not going to find a better transition point to end the book and start the next one than I have, and if I try, too much is going on. I already have three different settings and moods in the book. As is these sortof organize themselves into a rough three acts, so I get away with it, but if I add a fourth, it just won't work. I could go back and add more descriptions to things, but there's a limited amount I can do for that before I'm defeating the purpose of the book, which is to be a simple, bare bones, biographical style. Finishing the chapter I have and adding such descriptions could...maybe get me to 60,000, but that's still not enough.
I guess the only thing to do at this point is start expanding exposition. Ugh, I should have known the whole thing wouldn't be this easy. This last third-or-so is gonna fight me like a rabid pomeranian for my insolence.
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