#it feels simultaneously thrilling and unreal to be done with the first draft

[r-osehips]

well. I finished the first draft of the novel I have been working on since circa March 2022.

it is.

it is, um.

it is 292,432 words long.

is it good? not yet! is it consistent? absolutely not! I was figuring a lot out as I went so there are entire characters and key worldbuilding elements that pop up midway through (or even in the final chapter) who I need to go back and put in starting in chapter 1.

but that's how the (my) process works; that's the whole thing about "shitty rough drafts" (ty anne lamott); that's what revisions are for. so it's gonna be ok. and in the meantime I can celebrate that I wrote an average of 14.6K words per month during a period of my life that included burnout, medication issues, illness, and some time-consuming (but very happy) life events. I did not used to be able to do that!! and now I know that I can!

shoutout to nanowrimo 2022 for changing the game for me; shoutout to nanowrimo 2023 for getting me to the end of the first draft; and shoutout to my beloved favorite coffee shop, where I wrote probably about 200K of those words.

(the second draft is going to end up being about 200K words, I would guess; the third draft will be shorter than that. it will all be okay.)