After nearly two years of intermittent work on it, I have completed the first draft of my novel. It's been a very long road, fraught with frustration over finding time to write, overflowing with joy over putting words on the screen, and replete with discovery as I learned more about the writing process, even at this stage in my experience.

In the end, I have a 405-page double-spaced manuscript with 1-inch margins all around, and typed in 12-point Courier. I chose Courier just because it's the closest I could come to the way old-fashioned typed manuscripts were formatted, and it made the old-fashioned manuscript word count process (250 words per page) easier to track. I realize that style of word count isn't as important in publishing as it once was, but it did make my math easier as I wrote and kept track of the size of my manuscript versus the length of the book when it's eventually typeset.

All-in-all, I feel rewarded by having completed this process. And I will be rewarding myself by taking a few weeks off from the novel before I begin the rewrite process, which, as any would-be novelist learns, is the part of the process where the story really comes together and all the nuts and bolts are tightened. It is my hope that the time away from the manuscript will refresh my perspective on it, and help me polish it into the most perfect novel it can be when the process is complete.

I think it will ultimately be a couple of days before I can actually put the manuscript out of my mind completely for this break. I can't seem to prevent these three words from cycling through my brain right now: "I did it!"

From NPR, this may be one of the greatest "learning to love to read" stories I've ever read.

Olly Neal grew up in Arkansas during the 1950s. He didn't care much for high school. One day during his senior year, he cut class — and wandered into the school library.

 

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Writers take note:

November Short Story Contests - November brings some great opportunities, including the Roanoke Review Fiction Contest (Nov. 1), the Story Prize (Nov. 14), and the Ramble Underground Short Fiction Contest (Nov. 15). And that's just... [About.com Literary News]

Last night, I passed the 92,000-word mark on the first draft of my novel. I have written eleven chapters so far. I have one final chapter to complete. Interestingly, the last two chapters have come along much more rapidly than the middle of the story. I'm not exactly sure why that is, except that I have developed a quirky new habit about my work while I'm plotting chapters and scenes.

Every night, when I've ended my final new sentence for the evening, I start a new paragraph and type the words "And then all hell broke loose."

When I begin writing again the next night, the first thing I see is that sentence: "And then all hell broke loose." It spurs me on to ratchet the story up a notch higher than I had the night before. As a result, my writing is more productive and I feel better about the work I've already completed.

I don't know where I developed that habit, or even if it's original to me. I suspect that it is not my invention. I will say, however, that it works when I'm worried about where the story is going and whether I'm keeping things moving at a good clip in terms of advancing the story.

Try it sometime in your own work.

About.com offers some good advice for logistics in making times and places for writing groups, which could be an important part of any writer's growth.

Writing Group Logistics - Now that you've found members for your writing group, it's time to think about logistics. Restaurants, cafes, and living rooms provide great meeting places. For some groups, the meeting place... [About.com Literary News]

Cheryl Anne Gardner at POD People says it doesn't matter to her.

Personally -- as a reader of a wide range of fiction and non-fiction -- if a character name seems appropriate to the story, I don’t care if I can pronounce it or not. I wouldn’t meet someone for the first time and say, “I can’t pronounce your name, it seems odd to me, so, I don’t want to know you.” I don’t do that to fictional characters either. It’s the name the author gave them at birth, the name the author felt suited them, and so I generally respect the choice unless it seems utterly ridiculous for the language, the story, or the character, but in some cases a contradictory name can be important to the overall message, so I try not to pass judgement too hastily.

Literary agent Nathan Bransford reiterates and underscores the old saw: if you want to write well, read.

But how well-read do you need to be? And especially: how well-read in your particular genre do you need to be? Should you be familiar with everything or should you stay away to avoid influences to your writerly voice?

Literary agent Nathan Bransford wonders whether authors of the future will actually need publishers. The publishing industry is, like many others, in the throes of major transformation.

My guess is that we'll continue to see the mainstream publishing industry focus on the bestselling titles, and there will be a new crop of e-publishing services available for the rest. Some titles will rise up from the morass of author-published works and receive attention from the mainstream publishers, and some big authors will choose to take on the responsibilities of publishing themselves and bypass the publishers.

It's been a long road, and I still have a couple of miles to go. Last night, though, I achieved a milestone that is only 3,000 words shy of my original goal of an 88,000-word first draft novel. In the end, the first draft seems like it's going to be significantly longer than I had anticipated.

Over time, of course, the story has changed. The characters have taken on lives of their own and have altered the path and meaning of their collective journey in ways I couldn't have possibly conceived when I started this project in earnest a year and a half ago.

My wife and I like to joke that our solution to every problem we encounter is to buy a book about it. It's not entirely true. As a tech, my first instinct is almost always to Google it. Nevertheless, today I am ordering a copy of Write Great Fiction: Revising and Self-editing, because I am now close enough to finishing the first draft of my novel that I feel I require it.