Achievement Unlocked: One Hundred Thousand Words

That's a lot of words.

I hit 100,000 words yesterday—kind of a Big Deal™. I believe I have around 40,000 left to go to complete my first draft. After that, I switch over to exciting edit mode.

I'm looking forward to it. Whenever I go back to a previous chapter for reference, I see things that I want to change, which will drastically improve the overall flow and quality. Before I pass it to Beta Readers, I will do a complete pass of edits, necessary rewrites, dialogue formatting, and other things.

The good news is that my Alpha Readers have responded incredibly well to the story. It has evoked quite a strong emotional reaction. I think it's a powerful story, but then again, I created it. So, the only way to really know if it resonates with other people is to let them read it.

What's new since last week?

• I broke through the 100,000 words mark of my first draft.
• My novel is a dual-timeline, about twenty years apart. From the beginning, the timelines have danced and swirled around one another, finally converging into something big. Last night, I hit that big moment.
• A friend of mine, a published author, took a look at a sample I sent her and provided fantastic feedback.
• I discovered that I spell a lot of words using the preferred British spellings. grey/gray, dialogue/dialog, etc. I think this might be because I read quite a bit from British authors when I was young.