So I didn't, in fact, sit down and get back to writing Monday night, as I had planned. The Ogre was in need of a friend and that was more important than the writing, so we went out with Erik. I got back to work on Thursday night and have been slowly plodding through until now, with more to come in the future.
Since then, my noted word count is around 4,300 (about 17 pages for those who don't play the word count game), but I figure my actual word count is about 1,500 more than that. I've had to cut a lot of material I had previously written and that brings the number back down again. It's one of the problems I've been having with Wolf's Rain, where I wrote past where I had outlined to without stopping to think a bit about where I was going. As a result, I ended up writing about 10k that was just useless. Not that it was bad stuff, mind, just that somehow the characters went off and did things they had no right to be doing. There's always, so they say, a little bit of give and take with these things, but this was a bit beyond the pale. I'll spare you the gory details.
Now, I could have just cut this extraneous 10k right off the bat, but there were a few turns of phrase in there that I was particularly fond of and wanted to keep. More than that, I wanted to see if there were longer bits that I could salvage and so save myself time. As it turned out, I've managed to salvage quite a bit,but I don't think it's saved me any time at all. My writing's slowed to a crawl as I pore over what I had written previously again and again and see if I can apply any of it to my new scene. I should have known better; hell, I do know better. But there's a certain feeling of defeat to having to delete that much that I just didn't want to experience right then.
Now at this point, I've realistically got about 5 more long scenes to write before I'm done and about 5k of old stuff that's all pretty much going to end up deleted. I think the final word-count on the first draft will come out to a pleasant 67k, and I should finish by the end of next weekend, assuming I can figure out how one of my two Grumpy Old Men is going to free his daughter from prison.