I fucking did it. I set out to write a novel and I achieved that goal. Whatever happens next, I have proven to myself that I can do this!

The first draft was completed in the early hours of the morning and lands at roughly 121 000 words. To give you all some sense of length, I’ll compare my word count with a few other books:

The Hobbit-95,022
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban-106,821
A Game of Thrones-284,000

Now it’s time for some real-talk.

Writing this novel is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but at the same time nothing has ever made me as happy as when I have been working on it.

Confusing, right?

Some days really sucked and I questioned what the hell I was doing, while other days it was nothing but pure joy. Something that helped me tremendously during this process was the support in the writing community. I truly find it amazing that so many authors are willing to share their experiences for aspiring writers like myself. Reading that authors like Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin and others still struggle to this day, made me realize it was normal. It’s not only them, most authors I have talked to say the same thing: writing is fucking hard but you just have to push through.

So what happens now?

I’ll let the script rest for a while, so I can get some distance from it before it’s time to revise. I have hundreds of notes that I scribbled down of things I want to change/add/fix.
I want to make sure the story is where I want it to be before I start sharing it with the beta-readers.

Before the editing begins, I’ll take a break from the novel and work on a short story I have in my head. I also want to catch up on some tv-shows, games and movies that I have missed, either that or I’ll just sleep for a while.

Today is a great day 🙂