194 pages, 95 chapters and 119,000 words. All written in 57 days.
I just finished my first draft of The Cadetship and it’s the longest story I have ever written. I have consistently been working on it for pretty much every single day since the first of August when I sat down and word vomited 8,100 words. And those were good quality words as well.
I started off with the story idea just a week before I started writing it. And I’ve been building on ideas since then. Most times I made things up on the fly, other times I had a goal scene to get to and I made my own path to it. There were only two occasions where I had faulted and drew a blank on what happened next. The first time I decided to go back and do a light edit of my past writing to see if my brain was able to create something more, which it did. The second time I had reached the 3/4 mark and I began to panic. During that time the stress of coming so far and the thought of not completing it propelled me to brainstorm what I could do to my characters. This worked and I added some new ones in, including sub plot story lines.
I wrote, for the most part, every single day, working around my split shifts at work. I have managed to write on average maybe two thousand words a day. You can vaguely track my progress through my twitter account. I can’t believe I’ve been able to produce such a thing 🙂 Knowing I can write something like this means I can write anything I put my mind too.
God damn, how I have managed to surprise myself. I didn’t know I was capable of this until now. My future stories will be so fun and easy to write 🙂 Editing too will be a blast. I’ve already identified what things I need to work on and change too 🙂
By the time you read ths post I would have had a few days break before returning to the story tobegin my second draft. Honestly I’m not sure when this YA sci-fi will be out, but maybe next year. Here’s hoping 🙂
Stephanie Haggarty 