For those who don't know, I'd like to be a writer when I grow up (...well grow up more) and for the past few years I have been working on a novel. I've probably been working on it for as long as I've been working on this blog... I've found an extract it on one of my blogs from 2008 so it started in the same year.
The problem with my novel is I still haven't finished a draft yet. It's been going for nearly 4 years and I've yet to write "the end". I've started a 2nd draft without finishing the first one. Of course it takes time and patience for these things, I know that. But I recently looked at my archive for this blog (a bit of a nostalgic mood) and started to wonder... how big is this blog? So I've been copying the archives into Word so I can get a word count. In the first year and a half of this blog the word count is over 73,000 words. That's 3,000 words short of the first Harry Potter book.
If I had spent as much attention as I did to this blog as I did my novel I could have finished it years ago. 81 blog posts = a novel. Well, the first draft and a bit of a novel. I am obviously not going to call draft 1 finished. But even though my blogging pace has slowed down due to moving on to other blogging sites such as Tumblr and Twitter I still have managed to write a reasonable amount. This blog now contains over 130,000 words. Seeing as I'm aiming for my novel to be around 60,000 words that means I could have re-written it entirely and then some.
The obvious thing to do here is to spend some of the time I would blogging writing instead. So that's what I'm going to do. This novel has been a very on/off piece of work for a very long time now and I promise you I will finish it some day...
Some day...
The problem with my novel is I still haven't finished a draft yet. It's been going for nearly 4 years and I've yet to write "the end". I've started a 2nd draft without finishing the first one. Of course it takes time and patience for these things, I know that. But I recently looked at my archive for this blog (a bit of a nostalgic mood) and started to wonder... how big is this blog? So I've been copying the archives into Word so I can get a word count. In the first year and a half of this blog the word count is over 73,000 words. That's 3,000 words short of the first Harry Potter book.
If I had spent as much attention as I did to this blog as I did my novel I could have finished it years ago. 81 blog posts = a novel. Well, the first draft and a bit of a novel. I am obviously not going to call draft 1 finished. But even though my blogging pace has slowed down due to moving on to other blogging sites such as Tumblr and Twitter I still have managed to write a reasonable amount. This blog now contains over 130,000 words. Seeing as I'm aiming for my novel to be around 60,000 words that means I could have re-written it entirely and then some.
The obvious thing to do here is to spend some of the time I would blogging writing instead. So that's what I'm going to do. This novel has been a very on/off piece of work for a very long time now and I promise you I will finish it some day...
Some day...
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