Friends

And I passed the 1M words written (not all of them edited!!) (yet!) this morning. It was so strange to add my daily couple of paragraphs to the Leopard/Tree fic knowing this was coming lol. Wow. Glad I had my little crisis about it last year so I can just nod at it today while I step above it (crisis: ✅). I think when I started writing again in 2020 and firmly settled on the "one million bad words before you can get to the good ones" mindset, I expected I'd feel at least competent when I reached the milestone. Alas. Maybe because of the crappy first half of last year, I feel like I lost 2/3 of what I knew and still have to relearn so much about my own process and how to (hopefully) write well -- I've done it once or twice before, surely I can again ;) Anyway, that's done! \o/ Next milestone, one million edited words??? Though I guess I'm not really measuring that in any way that's easy to track, haha. It'll work out ;D This is cool. Maybe I should bake a word count celebratory cake like I used to during the lockdowns. Though I'll have to write the digits on top very small with so many of them now XD (Edit: OR MAKE A BIGGER CAKE I GUESS!!!!)

I miss sitting down with the concept for a novel and having a long first draft to lose myself into ahead of me, but mentally I can't do that while I have two other on-going novels, especially with the Soul Thief still a first draft itself. I think maybe when the structural edits are completed, that may free up the mental slot for "Big First Draft." I started the prep work on that, spending some time thinking about why I wrote it and what I want to leave readers with before actually starting the edits, this time. Like, who is the actual audience, also.

( Rambles on who to share one's writing with... )

Anyway, reaching a big milestone you've been working toward for years is kind of incredible actually. I'm awed. I'm happy. If nothing else, I've proven to myself that I can stick with it. I've learnt a ton. I've made connections with people, both on the reader side and on the writer side. Met all of you here! And I'm so excited to learn even more in the coming 5-to-10 years, which is the time period I'd given myself for that original milestone, haha. ONWARD!! :D