Done!

This is kind of old news by now, but I finished! I wrote a 50,000 word book in one month! It was exhausting, but far less time consuming than I thought.

My goal was 1,600 words a day. Every. Single. Day. Of course some days I wrote far less. Some days far more. But I wrote EVER SINGLE DAY. This might be normal for some of you, but not for me. I have a husband, two kids, a day job and a house! Weekends and evenings are usually very full for me. But I made a commitment to write as much  as I could every day, without ignoring my other responsibilites. You'll have to ask my husband how well I did at that, but I don't think anything went TOO neglected.

Another part of the reason I was able to finish so fast is because this was a contemporary romance - it's set in the real world, in current time, in a real place (names changed to protect identities, etc). When I write speculative fiction, there's world building that takes a lot of time and energy. The hows and whys and whatfors take a lot of thought, even if most of it doesn't end up in a story. For this, I put on angsty teen music, reverted to my teenage self and had at it. These characters spoke to me loud and clear!

My family ate a lot of Crock Pot meals and I didn't blog or do photography stuff much. When my husband worked late, I stayed up and wrote. If something came to me while out, I typed it with my thumb on my phone. I skipped a few showers and barely watched TV. But I wrote a novel in a single month!

What happens next? I have no idea. I've passed it along to a trusted CP and I'm following up on some fact checking things (side note: I know NOTHING about high school football and would be utterly lost without the Twitter Hivemind). I think I'll query it, but since it's so far outside my normal genre, I'm a little unsure of how to proceed. I'm about 40% through reading it just to read and I love it. I'm really proud of how it turned out. I love these characters and this story, so I'd love to see it out in the world. Until then, I'm just excited I finished!



P.S. I'll have my playlist for this story on the YA Misfits blog tomorrow, along with more about the actual plot, so if you're curious, check that out!