Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
Seriously. I cannot tell you how amazing it feels to have finished writing a novel. Unless you’ve done it, you just don’t understand. Over the past four days, I’ve been on fire — surging out words in massive marathons, writing over 19,000 words, pushing myself harder than I ever have before. And then I find the energy to keep going. And going. It’s been an insane, emotional, intense ride. And when I reached the end, when I finally wrote those words that every writer dreams of (THE END) I could no longer contain myself. I wept. I ugly cried. And then I hugged my wife and I ugly cried some more.
And who knows, maybe the massive chunk of novel I wrote in four days was complete nonsense. Maybe it’ll all need to be rewritten and dredged for the occasional spark of genius. But I feel so good and so happy and so accomplished that I honestly don’t care.
Of course, I have to give a little shout out to Adi Alsaid. Last night at around 11:50 pm (my time) he was asking if anyone wanted to do a word sprint and I said yes, of course. I love word sprints when I am half awake. But in 30 minutes I wrote 1k words. And then in the next 25 minutes, another 900. These words were the climax of my story and they came so fast and so quick and so easy. But, I honestly feel that having them as a word sprint was the best thing that could happen to me. I could have easily been stuck overthinking these moments rather than just getting them down on the page. And that led me to this morning, which started as just a few words and then more and more — until — I finished it. 66,418 words.
No, it isn’t perfect. Yes, it needs revising. Yes, it needs a lot of work. Yes, probably under 20k. Yes, the grammar is terrible and stilted and probably overflowing with passive voice. But it’s a book shaped thing. And I am happy. And that’s okay.
