Draft One of My Novel is Complete

In, gulp, December 2022 I started posting about my novel and periodically putting chapters up.

In 2024 I really wanted to push on and get it finished and for the second half of the year @bitterirony and I had a nice simple accountability process whereby we checked in with each other each week to see how much we'd got written.

By the end of that year I hit 60,000 and then, for some reason, also hit a wall. Over the course of 2025 I added some more words but couldn't push on and get to the end.

Now, I've managed it.

I've never completed any draft of a novel before, so this is a big moment for me.

Now I need to gather all the chapters together in one file - yep, being the random chaos monkey I am they are split over several machines and cloud storage systems and different packages including pages, word, libre, and scrivener.

Then, it can all sit and be ignored for a few weeks. But, on February 1st, I'll print it out and start the process of revision that will lead to Draft 2.

At this point, thanks to must be given to those who have shown interest and given support. I'm keeping a small list for my dedication page 😘 and they definitely include the folks who joined the reading list, looking at you:
@seki1
@ngwinndave
@lightpen
@alessandrawhite