Second Draft: The Countdown Begins

So I decided to start back up with the word counter thingie, except since I'm in the middle of a second draft that is growing quickly (and that I'm not rewriting from scratch), it's easier for me to do a page counter. Here's where I stand right now:

192 / 504 (38.1%)

To illustrate how different the second draft is, this is the corresponding place in the first draft:

153 / 466 (32.8%)

So I've fleshed out the beginning quite a bit. The manuscript is almost 10% longer than it was before. I don't know if the rest of the manuscript will grow at the same rate. I hope not. Then again, if I do still decide to go to Baen first, they want at least 100,000 words, and I'm still not there, so I've got room to grow without really needing to cut much more.

One cool thing I'm finding is that scenes that seemed sort of pointless or throwaway in the first draft are being rewritten to focus a lot more on the overall arc of the story and really draw out the conflicts between the characters. The second act wandered all over the map while I tried to find the storyline in the first draft. The second draft is much clearer and more focused.