I…did it. I’m done. Holy bleepin’ hell, I just typed “END” and finished this goddamned book.

Hah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

*continues to cackle*

*starts choking*

Ahem. Anyway.

No, the book isn’t really “done.” Not quite yet. I still need to go through and replace all my placeholders with actual words, stitch together any sections where I skipped ahead while I was writing and never went back to fill in the gaps, and I still need to fix that one scene that’s really more of a script than a scene (lots of conversation, very little actual description of…anything, really. White-room syndrome galore).

After that, I print the whole thing, stick it in a binder, and start cutting with the pencil lead of doom. There’s a LOT of bloat in this book, and it needs to become a lean, mean, fiction machine. After that, it’s betas, more revisions, possibly more betas, and then I start packaging it together for submission.

Final word count for this finished draft: 185,638.

And only three days past my self-imposed deadline of the 15th.

Huzzah!

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Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash