It’s “Wednesday Wafflings” when I post the latest entry in my Diary of a Hopeful Author…
Oh my days, I am excited. And it is not because we go on holiday in THREE WEEKS, although, to be fair, that is up there with the best of them. Nah, the news I bring you this week, after a couple of months of re-blogging old posts on a Wednesday because I have had my head down busy editing, is this: I have finished my novel. I will repeat that because it sounds soooo good: I have FINISHED my novel.
Yessury, after one whole year of researching, planning, developing outlines, creating a synopsis and eating my body weight in chocolate, my novel is now not only written, but edited – four times. I now have 74k words of, what I hope, is a cracking psychological thriller, the first in an instalment of three. Draft one of book one was 90k words, meaning that the four editing phases I have completed have culled nearly 20k words. Holy mother.
Next up now is to get it sent off to agents and then, go for it. I’ll post back next week on, what I think, are the dos and don’t of contacting agents on this one, so that’ll be one to watch out for. Until then, I am going to rest my fingers for one night and maybe not get up at 5am tomorrow. Just 6 am instead.
So, if you’re writing a book, or have an idea for one, all I can say is this: do it. Don’t give up, keep going, because when you finish it, when you know you’ve done the best you can, it doesn’t half feel good. And then you open the laptop and start book number two from scratch.
Writing a novel? How do you keep going? Still in the middle of writing or just finished yourself? Let me know.
Out tomorrow “Thursday Thoughts” where I post my latest Gazette newspaper column to my blog…**
Tagged: books, completing a novel, fiction, finishing your book, motivation, psychological thrillers, Reading, writing
