About a month and a half ago, I wrote an article explaining why I haven't been posting as much here on my blog. I explained it was because I was spending my time working on my novel instead...

Well, I thought I'd give an update on my progress thus far, along with a few other observations to those who might be interested. If you want to read them, please use eCash to continue.

First, let me start by saying that if you are reading this, I thank you for spending a little bit of your XEC to unlock this article, and spending a little bit of your time to read these words. If not for the handful of readers I am lucky to have, I would have probably lost my motivation to keep going a long time ago. But thanks to you, and others like you, I've managed to write consistently, and continuously, year after year, allowing me to slowly improve my craft.

I honestly believe it's the reason why I finally feel like I'm going to finish this time. That I'm going to finally finish writing the book that I first dreamed of writing more than twenty-five years ago.

Of course whether other people like it or not is still up in the air. There's also the fact that I still have quite a lot of work left to do, but for the first time, I can honestly say that I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I know I shouldn't get ahead of myself, that I should just keep my mouth shut, finish the thing, and let it stand on its own, but maybe the reason I'm over sharing is because I've come to realize that in a way, this blog is just as important to me as my book. I want to grow my readership here, grow the number of paying customers, and increase my overall revenue, like an actual business. So I need to just keep posting, even if it might sometimes mean I'm over sharing.

As far as my book goes, I'd say I'm currently about a third of the way through what I would call my first draft. For the first few weeks after I restarted this project (my book), I focused my effort on putting together a rough "mold" to begin. Just something good enough to give me an idea of what it could be turned into.

Luckily, I was able to copy and paste sections from some of my past efforts to speed up the process, even if I still needed to add some transitions or other details to make it all fit. I admit I frequently found myself fighting my laziness during this phase of the process. For example, I didn't want to have to do the hard work of having to fit everything together, so I would put it off and tell myself I would go back and fix it later.

But I got through this phase, and at the end I felt like I had something I could at least work with. At this point, the manuscript was about 20,000 words, which is obviously way too short for a novel, but I knew I was nowhere near done. So I spent another few weeks going through it again, adding some of those details and transitions I knew were missing before, and the number of words went from 20,000 to 35,000. Again I found myself having to fight my laziness, but I managed to power through, helped by the fact that I could see that my story was getting better.

Seeing the progress helped me stay motivated, but I knew this draft was still not good enough. There were still more parts I needed to go through and improve before I could let anyone read it. So that's what I'm currently working on. I'm going back and polishing it one more time with the hope that I will consider it decent enough for my family to read. Something I would consider a rough first draft. They want to give me feedback, they said, and I thought it would be a good idea to make sure there wasn't anything I was missing before doing the long, hard work of producing a final draft.

I'm hoping that I will finish sometime in the middle of next year (a few months before my family's deadline for me), but we'll see. I'm shooting for anywhere between 50,000 to 75,000 words. Basically not very long, but not too short.

I obviously have no idea if anyone will read my book when I'm done writing it, but as long as I'm proud of it, I'll be happy to have finally finished something I first set out to do when I was still just a young man.

Anyway, I'll keep you posted on how things are going. As always, thank you for reading.

What I've been working on