Yeah me! I finished my first novel, finally. "Texas is a state of mind", the novel I started in November 2003 with Nanowrimo is complete. So what, that's like 2 years and 8 months to finish a novel of 77,740 words or 138 pages single spaced. Talk about slow production.

I went to a seminar last Monday called "Stop Dreaming and Start Writing" at The Learning Annex given by Ivory Madison, creator of The Red Room, and Ivory said that a typical first novel is 75,000 words. I guess my novel is typical then. Her contention was that a person could write 1,000 words in one hour and that if you had that kind of production, you could finsih a novel in 75 hours. That's kind of like two weeks of work or 8 hours a day for two weeks.

If I had written one hour a week for 75 weeks, my novel should have taken me 18 months to write. Instead it took me 30 days to write 50,000 words and 31 months to write about 28,000 words. And this is just my lousy first draft!

There is seriously something wrong with my motivation to be a writer. Writing the first draft is supposed to be easy part. It's the editing that is going to be the hardest.

So I'm doing the math in my head and if I had written one hour a day, say five days per week and my word count was about 5,000 words, I would be able to finish a 75,000 word novel in about four months.

I've always wondered how people can take the time to get so many degrees. Now I know. The time just goes and you might as well do something useful with it like get another degree or my case, write my novels. And I only need to dedicate maybe 5-7 hours a week to write 5,000 words a week. It doesn't matter if I do it in 5 days with 1,000 words a day, or a I have a marathon writing session on the weekend, as long as I stick to the 5,000 words a week production rate, I should be able to finish my novels quicker.

Well, at least I have a fnished novel under my belt. Now there are the other two novels to finish that I started, "The Crow Priestess" and "Changing Timelines". I haven't forgotten about my first novel attempt "Following in the Dark", but I decided that I was going to write that novel for my own pleasure and never let anyone else read it. The Texas novel is the third novel I started.

""Following in the Dark" was the first, started in 2001. "The Crow Priestess" was started in 2002. "Texas is a State ofMind" was started in 2003, and "Changing Timelines" was started in 2004. I did some writing in 2005 when I started working on my second screenplay, "Silicon Valley Gold Diggers Anonymous." I never finished it, but at least I outlined a fairly decent plot from beginning to end for the story.