I've finished writing Lady of the Horde

I've finished writing Lady of the Horde.

Let me say that one more time: I've finished writing Lady of the Horde!

A month and a half ago, the suggestion of such a statement happening now would've been absurd.

I started writing it in June.  By the time I took my trip to see family in Ohio a month later, I didn't have all that much to show for myself, and for the rest of July, I still limped on, even though I had a whole week following the week in Ohio free.  I did write that week, but not as much as I might've.

Certainly not as much as I did later!

On August 9th, the floodgates opened.  I knew I wanted to make better progress.  I had no idea how much rapid progress I was about to unleash!  A month ago I finally began just writing daily.  At the beginning of September I had a five-day weekend, and I wrote roughly six thousand words every day.  Today I completed work with one last comparable session.

I cannot believe it!

I started writing book-length manuscripts with the help of the late National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which I first tackled in 2004 (and then the succeeding two years, in which I completed the first manuscript).  I wrote a series of book-length manuscripts soon after, and then a decade ago, my mom passed away, and I lost all that momentum.

I slowly worked my way back into fighting shape.

For the past four years, now, I've been writing book-length manuscripts again.  Lady of the Horde was by far the longest yet.  It clocked in, as expected, at roughly 144,000 words, and as the days progressed I found myself not just in the zone, but writing exactly the kind of storytelling I always chase, remembered from the best of what I produced for Collider, last year, which ended up being the motivation for how I wanted to end Lady.  

I had intended to finish tomorrow, but I had already determined the symmetry of the last two chapters, and I just had to keep writing, and so here we are!  I knew the last sentence, so that was incredibly easy, too, and very rewarding in and of itself.

The story kept surprising me.  As these things tend to go, after a while it really seemed to be writing itself.  Not in an AI way!  I typed all of it myself!  But the storytelling took over, in ways I hadn't previously imagined.  This is a story that's roughly thirty years in the making.  I was just as much a callow youth sketching wildly as I was with the bones of Collider, and my outline, because there was more to follow, was if anything rougher, because I thought I knew enough not to keep revising it, as I had with the first book.

I was so wrong!  But it ended up working anyway.

So that's three books down, in the cycle.

...And plenty more to go...