write a novel and get it published

Just getting started on it today :-) 750 words in the first hour.

I’ve just finished the first draft of my novel, a little shorter than I anticipated, at 74000 words – (I somehow had two copies of one of the chapters in there, which had bolstered the length. Whoops!)

I actually feel slightly shell shocked to have done it.
Now I’m going to print it, and put it away for a couple of weeks – then read, and start the rewrite.

I’m just writing the penultimate scene – the big action climax. I’d better not stop long – I’ll lose my momentum! After that, I just have the “tie up loose ends” kind of bit at the end.

Unfortunately I haven’t written for 5 weeks because of work commitments … sometimes there really are no free seconds. Well, I got back to it last night … I’m currently just past 67,500 words – good job :-) We’re building up to the climax :-o

My first draft passed 55,000 words last night, and is definitely over halfway through telling the story.

I’ve also joined http://writingforums.org and the discussions on there are helping me think about focusing my writing better.

I just passed 40,000 words :-)

I’m trying to write something every day… mostly I make it. Sometimes it’s a lot, sometimes it’s just a couple of sentences, but it keeps me moving forward.

The first draft of my current fiction project has just passed 31000 words. I’ll take as many words as I need to tell the story, but 90000 is a reasonable length for a novel, so I’m happy with my progress.

In the last month I’ve decided to abandon my original big writing project, which had begun to feel like “flogging a dead horse” – I’d lost interest and was just doing it because I felt I should. I think as a person I’d changed a lot in the three or four years since I began that story, and it just didn’t “fit” me any more.

Now I’ve started a new project. I started the research during August, though I only just started writing the actual content just over a week ago – I’m up to almost 5 500 words, and have written something every day. So far I’m really enjoying writing this, hopefully I can keep up the momentum – that should let me complete my first draft in around three months.