This weekend I completed the first draft of Chapter 3 of the sci-fi novel I'm writing. Word count for the entire story is now at 13,705 words.
I had to do some research on the CDC for this chapter to get some verisimilitude. I exchanged an e-mail with a woman in their Media News department and asked some detailed questions, so I'm probably on a watch list somewhere now. They take a while to answer e-mails (like, a week). I still haven't gotten answers to my questions, so I just bulled past that point and will go back and tweak it in the edit.
The next chapter will be about the same in length, at least according to my outline. That said, I discovered as I was writing that I needed to add more material to Chapter 3 to provide some bridging material and to up the sense of urgency. Looking at the material in in my notes for Chapter 4, I can already see that I'm going to have to break apart some of the scenes into separate pieces and re-write parts of the outline for a better story, rather than a series of information dumps.
This writing stuff takes time to do. It'd be much easier if I didn't have to keep going to work instead of staying home and writing. Pesky work.