138 words

…to make a woman fall in love with you. Okay, no. I’m not even sure how to do that in 20,000 or so, though I  believe that’s about what it took.

No, I just finished my lunchtime writing session, and I am 138 words short of 100,000 words. I know my goal to the right over there says 120,000, but that’s only because that’s about where my last novel came in. Common wisdom puts ca. 100k words as the right length for a debut novel. I may yet hit 120k, but almost hitting the “magical threshold” is a milestone worth trumpeting, considering it’s taken me over a year and a half to get to this point (though I’ve written something like 170k to get here).

I’m knee-deep in story climax at the moment. My protagonists are chasing a bad guy down the stairs, not knowing they’re headed right into a second bad guy and a bit of a tight spot. I’m having fun writing this. Would that I could blow off work the rest of the day and just keep going.

Of course I can’t/won’t do that, but I do intend to celebrate just a little. Five more minutes during a break and I will hit the milestone. This novel has been perhaps the hardest work I’ve done with writing. It feels good to see it all coming together and managing to be close to what I had envisioned. It’s still quite rough, of course.

But it’s nearly done.