A milestone!

Hooray! My book just passed the 100,000 word mark. I suspect that this manuscript is going to be between 110,000 and 120,000 words when I'm done. Once it's edited, who knows? But this does mean that I'm that much closer to having the damn thing written. Once completed, this will be the third complete draft (with a fourth that was about 40,000 words before I shitcanned it and started over -- the first 1/3 of the draft I'm finishing is comprised largely of material that I salvaged from that draft).

When it's truly done, I expect some publishers to balk at a manuscript of its size from an unproven author. This is not uncommon at all. Worse comes to worse, I'll shelve it until I get some of my other work published, then put this one out there once I've got a few other books under my belt. Such is the business of publishing.

Even if this book never gets published, I'll just be glad to have it written, finished, and polished. I've been working on this particular story, in various incarnations, since 1997. Not continuously, of course -- I've gone as much as a year or two without doing much writing at all, and I have other projects in the works, but this is and has been my primary book. It's one of those stories that I MUST tell, or it won't leave me alone. So finishing it will be a huge thing for me.

But dammit, it will get published eventually. I will NOT self-publish or sell my soul to the scamtacular institution that is Publish America...but one day, it WILL be published.

For now though...I need to finish it. And I'm just happy that I've finally gotten this far.

YAY. Off to Denny's for a super cheap and moderately delicious meal to celebrate.