Novel update and blog announcement

I turned in the second draft of my novel Leave Society, forthcoming summer 2021 from Vintage Books, on July 15. It’s ~82,000 words. Each of my novels has gotten longer. Eeeee Eee Eeee was ~35k words. Richard Yates was ~50k words. Taipei was ~75k words. I feel calm and wise having a steadily increasing novel length. I want my next novel to be shorter, though, maybe ~50k words.

Here are the word counts of all the drafts so far (the Jan 17, 2020 one counts as the first draft because it’s the first one I showed my editor/agent) of Leave Society:

Oct 12, 2018. 143,452 words.
Nov 22, 2018. 111,672 words, without prologue
Mar 6, 2019. 97,059 words, 7 parts, 50 chapters
May 7, 2019. 82,173 words, 4 parts, 40 chapters
Jul 21, 2019. 83,063 words, 4 parts, 36 chapters
Nov 4, 2019. 87,201 words, 4 parts, 35 chapters
Jan 17, 2020. 91,300 words, 4 parts, 32 chapters
July 15, 2020. 82,205 words, 4 parts, 31 chapters

The novel is set from November 2014 to January 2018. I used 526,939 words of notes—and probably around 100 hours of Voice Memos—that I took from October 2013 to January 2020 to help me write it. The 143,452 draft mentioned above is selections from the notes.

Some reasons I decided to start a blog:

1. I don't like everything I publish, on Medium, Patreon, Twitter, Instagram, having likes/favorites. It seems detrimental to mental health for everything I publish to have a number attached to it showing how much people like it.
2. I have a lot of extra material from writing Leave Society that I can talk about here, for example books or papers that I wanted to reference but didn't fit in the novel.
3. I liked having a blog from 2005-2013. It was called Reader of Depressing Books and four of the posts can still be read here. I regret deleting the rest of the blog. I probably had hundreds of posts. In 2013 and again in 2018 I had strong desires to winnow down my internet presence. Now it seems better to me to have more, rather than less, of my stuff online.
4. I liked when my friends had blogs and we all linked to each other's blogs on our blogs.

Another thought:

I decided to just have the default urls for my sites, for example having my main site by taolin.tumblr.com, and this blog be leavesociety.blogspot.com, in part because I used to have taolin.info and somehow I couldn't get it renewed. There was some problem with Google, so I lost the url, and had to relink all my sites to my new url. Seems easier to just have the default url.