It's Done!!!

Well, sort of...
As some of you may know, I've spent the last 3 months scrambling to finish my novel. I started last Christmas, but hit a series of dead-ends in the plot and wasted away the majority of the year with outlines and irrelevant research. Finally, somtime around the middle of September, I just said, "Just write" and I did. I didn't restart every chapter because I didn't think it was good enough; I just fought through it. And, in the three months since then, I've written around 500 pages with a total wordcount of around 110,000 words.

The novel is, by no means, finished. I'm taking the next month off of writing in order to clear my head and study for finals. After that, I'm going to start editing and revising with hopes of finishing by June or July and begin to pursue getting it published. Although I know I still have a ways to go, it's just amazing to me that I actually wrote a piece of writing that is long enough to be considered a novel. I always tried to write novels and failed after ten pages when my interest waned. But now, I've got a binder containing hundreds of pages in front of me and a few months of editing ahead of me. It still feels great just to know that I, after years of trying to write a book, did it. The best part of all of it is that I'm giving a copy of the rough draft to my grandfather. He was the one who first introduced me to the thriller genre and many of the author's that inspired me to become a thriller author. So it's just like a big, 500 pages "Thank You" gift for him.

After I'm done editing and begin trying to publish, I'm hoping to begin another novel in the same series. My main character is pretty fleshed out and I have the basic concepts for 9 or more full novels and dozens of short stories centered around him, so I hope to change this one book into an entire series. I've already got two novels fully outlined in the series that I was writing before I switched to this one, so my plan is to work on them while trying to get published.

P.S: Merry Christmas everybody!