Hello All,
First off, for those who read this far, THANK YOU! This entire thing started as an impulsive idea to see if I could actually finish a novel of any kind. I hit a writing rut after my brother's death, and this was the first new project I started after years of not writing.
If you couldn't already tell, THERE WAS NO OUTLINE!! When I say impulsive, I mean I found out about this site and immediately started posting and ended up committing myself to daily updates without stopping to think about it. I wrote the first chapter on February 10th, 2025, and the last on April 24th, 2026 (438 DAYS!)! Admittedly, I did miss a few days here and there, but overall, I am exhausted, but proud that I at least finished it! More than anything, I wanted to build the discipline to write every day.
Saying that, I am aware… It's terrible. Each day, I sat down to write approximately 1000(ish) words and submitted them as soon as I was done. NO EDITING. NO RE-READING. 429,820 words of unplanned story. Only a basic idea of the characters and where they were supposed to go, and they clearly got away from me. So many things happened that I never planned for, and I ended up forgetting to add storylines I had thought of when I first started this project. The ending was a bit abrupt, but I am coming up on some major life changes, moving across the country, buying a new house, starting a new job, and taking care of an ill family member all at once, so I rushed to get it somewhere end-like.
Story of a writer's life, right?
Anyway, now that the overall first draft is done, I am going to take a break for a few months and then come back and EDIT! I have been keeping notes of everyone's comments and reviews, what needs to be fixed, adjusted, and trimmed, and I am excited to go back and dig into the characters even more. I want to get rid of the excessive descriptions and clean up the storytelling, adding more present scenes where they were just descriptions before. I had a bunch of ideas that never made it into the story because I wrote too far to go back and add them while it was ongoing that I want to add, and I want to give cleaner endings to several of the character arcs and relationships. I want to build out the world more, as I have several other story ideas set in this world.
I want to CATCH ALL THE TYPOS! So many of you were so helpful in pointing them out, and I can't thank you enough! You were all amazing and so kind.
I suspect editing will cut out a lot of the extra stuff people were less interested in, but the added story lines will probably make up for that loss, if they don't end up making it even longer overall. The rating might even go up, because I definitely planned on more romance than I actually ended up with.
Again, thank you to everyone who spared the time to read this first go round. The only reason I managed to stick with it was because I could see the readers!
Thank you so much. I can't put into words how much it means to me and how much it's helped me fall back in love with writing.
I can't wait to start editing and then posting the final draft!
~Llelo