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.

I'm close. So close.

After writing just three more chapters, I will become one of the storied 8 percent of would-be novelists who ever actually completes a first draft. I do not know from where that figure comes, nor am I particularly inclined to research it just now. But it does feel good to think that I am almost to a place where I can count myself among those who have had the spark of inspiration for writing a novel, and then gone on to actually do the work of writing it.

The past week has been a particularly devastating one in terms of making time to sit down and type on a keyboard outside of work. Bad news, sad news, illness, accidents, and simply life in general can all step in front of a writer's "me" time, which is the time he uses to physically put those thoughts and ideas that have been rolling around like boulders in his head all day into narrative form in a word processor. The past week, for me, has been a doozy.

..."hand."

In my not-so-spare time, I have been working on a novel.

I've been writing for 1-to-2 hours per night for months, after a nearly year-long hiatus on the project while the duties of my day job spun my life into a 24/7 tech support spiral. I originally stopped working on it in May of 2008. I picked it up again almost exactly a year later after finding a new job that required me to spend less of my spare time working.

I actually began writing this novel while on vacation at Myrtle Beach in the early summer of 2004. At first it was a mere 1,500 word introduction to an idea without a direction. Really, I didn't even have any characters at that point. I started with a simple description of a scene in my head. From there, the story just kind of grew on its own.

Tonight, that simple scene has produced words that form sentences, sentences that form paragraphs, paragraphs that form pages, and pages that form chapters, and chapters that form...well, 75,000 words. It's a magic number in the world of novel writing. Everywhere you look online, you'll see that 75,000 words is often the delimiter that defines the difference between a novella and a novel. Once you hit the 75,000 mark, you are writing a full-on novel.

To put it in perspective, what I have written so far is almost 2,000 fewer words than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

That said, I am not done. I have begun the concluding arc in this tale, but there is much more left to do. One thing I can say at this point, though, is that I now have an expectation of approximately how long the first draft manuscript will be when completed.

And, yes, the 75,000th word in my novel really is the word "hand."

Two Peas Publishing announces the paperback release of Don Meyer's novel Jennifer's Plan (ISBN: 978-0984077311). The book is available through amazon.com and other online retail outlets.

The novel is an action-oriented crime drama that follows Jennifer Cerriety as she fulfills her plan to seek retribution against a gang of roughnecks who commit unspeakable acts of violence against her and a man named Harold Seaweather.

Midwest Book Review gave the hardcover edition of Jennifer's Plan five stars, calling it "a masterpiece of narrative storytelling and a highly recommended addition to community library collections and supplemental reading lists."

Don Meyer is the author of three books, including Jennifer's Plan, Winter Ghost, and the Vietnam War memoir The Protected Will Never Know.

Jennifer's Plan is available for purchase by booksellers from Two Peas Publishing. It is available for retail purchase through Amazon.com, Don Meyer's website, and other retail outlets.

Recently, while thinking about some work I'd done on a new project I'm working on, I happened upon an article about writing a novel in 100 days or less.

There's a great amount of good advice in there, especially for the first-time novelist. But along about the last 10 days of his process, I started wondering how long ago the article was written, and why there's no mention of on-demand printing and self-publishing as options for the first-timer.

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The site is also a marketing tool for time travel-related fiction by author James Hanback, Jr., the site's owner and maintainer.

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