Two thousand, five hundred and twenty-four days.
Three hundred and sixty weeks.
101, 380 words.
Actually, no. I’m off by two words. Forgot to count “The End.”
Yes, roughly 60,576 hours later, Don’t Stop Believin’ is done, or at least the first draft is. Time to back up that file, and start thinking about another story or two before I start rewriting this one.
It’s been an interesting week, quite honestly. My mother-in-law passed away Friday, on her ex-husband’s birthday, which turned out to be the day after I wrote the last words. The moment itself was…humbling, and surreal. My first thought was, “Holy crap, I’m really done.”
It was certainly an intriguing journey. In the real world, I’ve changed jobs twice, and added a child to my family. In the book, two people have died, one gave her life to Christ, and another is almost there. It took me almost seven years to tell a story that only spans 65 days. That worked out to 151 days of actual writing, spread out over the aforementioned 2,524 days, or about once every 16 days. When I was writing, I was cranking out an average of about 670 words a day. But there were long stretches of no writing, for different reasons. Most of the time, I blamed my muse for no longer speaking to me. In her defense, I didn’t really try speaking to her, so it’s fair for her to keep quiet, I suppose. Ah well.
For the next few days, no more writing. Visitation is Tuesday, and the funeral is Wednesday. It’ll be a long week. I’ve already got the basics for the next story in mind. It’s a short I wrote a couple of years ago, and I think it’s worth turning into a novel. At least I hope it is.
[…] definitely needed to marinate for a while – several years, in fact. Then again, it took me over six years to finish the first draft. I ended up cutting something like 25k words during subsequent drafts, and completely rewrote a […]