Ansuz

« Astrology of Eris | Home | On problems and talking about ... »

In which a milestone is reached

I have just completed the main writing stage for my novel Shining Path. By that I mean that no more "write more material here" markers remain in my manuscript. All the material that I think needs to be included is now written, in at least draft form. Much of it has in fact been edited to near-final form. I do not really have a complete first draft yet, because I still have to put the chapters in order and fill in a lot of names and dates. But this is, nonetheless, a major milestone and cause for celebration. The next step will be to print it all out for the first time, and figure out the order of chapters.

The manuscript as it currently stands is 411 pages in standard manuscript form, corresponding to 102,750 words the way publishers normally count. The actual word count (measured by really counting words instead of pages, with each numeral counting as one word and hyphenated compounds counting as the number of hyphens) is 95,702. When complete this will be the third novel I've completed, but it's the first one I consider professional quality. I've been working on it since 2003, though only intensely for the last couple of years.

2 comments

Well done. I just cracked 50k words on my current mystery novel project, after one month of writing full time. Another 50k to go in the next month and the I can put this puppy to bed. At a book every four months (2 months writing, 2 months down time to recuperate) I just might clear a little over $6500 this year. Hopefully you can make more than a grand or two off yrs. Owen - 2010-10-11 21:50

If this is the same one that involved the seru kappa, then I very much look forward to reading it. If it's something else entirely, then I still look forward to reading it :) Meg - 2010-10-12 11:10