I’ve been off of here for the past while because I’ve been a bit busy! As the title suggests, yes! I’ve finished my novel!

After multiple versions with my own “NaNoWriMo,” many of cups of tea, hundreds of albums listened to, and pumping over 15,000 words in the past two days, I finally completed the story last night around 11:30pm.

It seemed like a long journey, but it really was not all that bad. I was able to say what I had to say in the story and hit all of my plot points with ease.

Was it relieving to type “The End?”

Yes and no. I was grinning wildly when I finished the book, but I had just done over ten hours of writing that day. I was pretty tired.

What’s next?

Well, I’ve never published a book before, so I’ll have to really work on studying how that system all operates.

I definitely need to take the time and hard edit the entire story. There’s a lot of little things I knew about when writing that I had to go back and fix, but I left it until the end. I wanted the skeleton of the story done first, followed by my editing to fix up the rest.

Then I’ll need test readers. I have a lot of friends who I went to University with for English. They’ll be the first on the docket to get the story. I’ll pass the early draft on to some friends and family of varying ages as well to see how the different audiences like it.

Once completed, I’ll go back to editing!

When the corrections are made, I’ll probably send it off to an editor to get looked at – maybe that would be the last edit? I don’t know!

And finally, I’ll move on to publishing.

I still have a long while ahead of me, but I’ll definitely get it sorted all out. I do not have a deadline exactly in mind yet, but I’m sure I’ll find one when I figure out how the publishing aspect works.

Thanks you kindly for reading and your many words of support over the past year. I’ll be back soon with some updates on how editing works!

Ah, the joys of being a writer.

And Happy Halloween!