If you look at the “In Progress” bar to the right, you might see something interesting. That 100%? Yeah. I finished the initial draft of WiW last night. It didn’t quite make it to 100,000 words, but that doesn’t matter. I wasn’t trying to hit that number spot on. It was a number I didn’t want to exceed (but I would have if the story called for it). There’s probably a couple months of work left on it, between having some people close to me check it out and editing.
Finishing it was sort of anti-climactic. I always hear stories of how great authors feel after they’ve written that last word, but I just felt numb. I sat in front of my computer and stared at it for a couple minutes, dutifully copied out the word count into a spreadsheet I keep to track each day’s output (there’s a feature I need in StoryBox), updated the progress widget on the blog, and then stared some more.
Maybe it’s just that I know there’s still work ahead, with editing, querying, and publishing. Maybe I had just pushed so hard to get through the last chapter. I just don’t know.
But, this morning, I’m excited. It’s done. I think it might be pretty good. I won’t know until I’ve read it a couple weeks from now.
I’m going to give myself through the weekend to decide on the next project.
One of my concerns in making that choice is timing. In November, I’m going to David Farland’s Writers Death Camp, and he recommends being well into the project you’re going to be working on before getting there. But the timing is such, if I start a new project in three days and it follows the pattern of WiW (90k words), I could be done with it only days before going to the workshop. Or worse, I’ll finish it on Monday or Tuesday and have nothing to write for the rest of that week.