At approximately 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday October 29, I completed the zero draft of my first novel, “The Survivors.” It is a galaxy spanning space opera that addresses unchecked power and control, species-ism, and features a man who is pushed beyond his self imposed limits to break the rules in order to confront an unknown alien attack.
I started writing these characters in my seventh grade english class in 1984, and while I haven’t thought about them every day since then, I have thought about them and this story well more than half of those days. Thirty-eight years is a long time to carry something around in your head, and fortunately, I updated the story, the characters, the FTL travel, the technology, the biology to make it a more mature version of my 7th grade adventure story. It is a blend of hard SF/space opera (the Expanse, Embers of War, Shards of Earth) but I have a society below the surface and complex politics within and between three sentient races (Dune, Enders Game).
During the early stages of the pandemic, I became aware of the Flights of Foundry con, which I attended, and I met some lovely people there who inspired me and invited me to join a local online writing group. I began really drafting and plotting (I tried Save the Cat, the 3-act, 9-block, 27-chapter method, but what worked best for me was the Snowflake method) during 2020, adding to my approximately 10k word back story and eventually filling out more than 50k words of character backstory, timeline, future history, and plotting notes. At the beginning of last November, I had written seven chapters (about 15k words), and during the month I wrote around 20 chapters, winning my first ever NaNoWriMo with 50,277 words in 30 days.
The sad thing about that is that I totally burned myself out writing that much that fast while also holding down my real job and dealing with my real life, and I didn’t write more until June, but since then, I brought the chapter count up to 48, the page count up to 468, and the word count up to 120,687 (at least according to Scrivener). And I finished it. I can now say that I have written a novel.
As I came near the end of the story, i started realizing all the stuff I had left out, all the extra stuff I was going to have to cut, all the characters and starships that still need names besides {insert cool name here} and I need to tie up some loose ends, and in some cases, add the beginning of the loose end that was later tied up… but that will wait at least a month. I have a plan for revision, and I am going to first give myself the break that everyone says you should take in order to give yourself time and space to be able to evaluate it.
But, no matter what, I am no longer a writer. I am a novelist.