I have finished the first draft of my first novel, Dark House.
Word count: 66,873
Time to complete: A year and some change – I did not write consistently.
I’m proud, but it’s definitely not time to pop open the bubbly yet. I have some serious editing to do. For example, my main character had a trait that I decided I didn’t want her to have about half of the way through the first draft, so I have to go back and almost completely rewrite the first several chapters. There were days where I completely ignored punctuation, those sections will be a joy to edit. I changed the spelling of a character’s name between chapters and wasn’t consistent with it at any point.
Since my novel is on the short side, I’m hoping the editing phase will leave me with a longer book. Knowing me and the way I write, it’ll be even shorter by the second draft. 
My deadline for finishing my first draft was May 26th. Look at me, ahead of schedule! I just got in the mood and wrote for three hours straight yesterday afternoon, and all the sudden it was done!
Writing the first draft of Dark House has been a highlight in my life over this past year.
I’m one step closer to sharing this story!
K. J. Cole 
I just read this post, the procrastination post and some of the other ones in the “My First Novel” category.
Your week one post on this journey was almost exactly a year ago. I see that you’ve had ups and downs with this but never quit. I’ve always wanted to write books, the farthest I’ve gotten is 17 pages. I don’t really know what happened, do you have any advice for how to keep a novel going? (Not just the not giving up part, also how do you make one plotline last a book length?)
I don’t know, your posts about this book have just been so intriguing and inspiring to me, you’ve done what I’ve always been procrastinating to do. I would love to buy this book when it gets published. (Although you really haven’t revealed much about storyline of the book.)
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First of all, thank you so much for your comment. It made my day!
My advice for keeping a novel going, in my limited experience, is you have to find the right story idea. The annoying part is, you don’t know if you’ve got a gripping story until you start writing. I’ve started a handful of novels over the past six years and abandoned them all pretty early in the process. The idea for this book was super exciting to me in the beginning and it’s stayed that way all through writing the first draft.
Thank you for reading my blog! I think I’ll post the first chapter of the book here when it’s all edited, I’ll be excited for you to read it!
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