10k

Ladies and gentlemen, today I have reached the quiet, unimposing milestone of ten thousand words in my novel. The moment passed, unnoticed and unannounced. Except for right now, as I’m announcing it to everyone.

Yes, I have done something today which I’ve only done once before. And before, it was about vampires, so we don’t talk about that.

There was a time when I would have thought writing ten thousand words on the same subject would be an insurmountable task, or at least a unlikely-to-be-mountable task. Or, well certainly a longish task. Longer than the five weeks it took me. That time was probably around a year ago.

I feel I have come a long way since then. I’ve honed my skills, focused my attention, made writer friends who help and advise me. I’ve been published several times, and even been paid for a couple of them. And most importantly, I’ve got a blog and a twitter account.

Now, I am perhaps ten percent of the way through a first draft of a novel. If only the me from a year ago could see me now. He’d probably say ‘Oh, that’s nice. What a reasonable, mountable achievement that is. I bet I could do that given a years time to practice my skills and then plan and begin writing. I think I will do that, actually.’

And I never would have got to this plateau today if not for all the help of my several fans. They are the ones that drive me onward toward my goal of  being able to point to my name on a shelf in the ‘please buy these books they are taking up too much space’ bin at Quarter Price Books and say ‘Hah! I told you I was an author! What? No… that’s not my real name… plenty of people use pen names… well… no I cant prove it’s my pen name… well yes I could show you the royalties check, but, I’m still waiting on one…’

So thank you all for your kind and encouraging words, and know that you’ll be reading eight or ten more of these posts as I congratulate myself for every ten thousand word chunk I grind out.

Good night!