How’d That Happen? Finished my 7th Novel/Novella!

Two and a half years ago, I began what I thought would be a short story of around ten pages. Today, I wrote the final sentence down in my first draft of what had become Like Normal People.

I had just finished reading the Legend trilogy for the second time, and I thought to myself “you know, I really would like a story that would tell what happened to Day and June.”  This was before Life After Legend came out.  They say that you should write the story that you want to read, and that’s exactly what I did.

I learned a lot while writing this story.  One thing I learned was to never publish part of a story when you don’t at least have the first draft finished.  At the moment, I have two novels that are about 2/3 of the way done that I haven’t started publishing on AO3 because of this.  I had written about 14 chapters of this book… it just came to me, and I was a writing fiend.  Then I had to write a chapter where Daniel (Day) and June went mountain climbing — and I don’t know a thing about mountain climbing.  After watching a few videos about mountain climbing, and about El Capitan, I still wasn’t ready to write this chapter.  Then I moved, and I forgot about this story.  I forgot about writing (although I was writing in a journal, so I was still writing something).

This February, I got a message from someone asking me to finish this story.  I had already started writing fiction again, and I was partially through writing Saving Adelinetta.  I decided to reread Legend and work on this again.  You never know what a difference your encouragement will make.

I wrote like mad for a while, and then… I got writer’s block again on this book, on chapter 22.  It took five months for me to write that chapter.  In the meantime, I wrote more on Saving Adelinetta, wrote two novellas, and wrote about 2/3 of another novel that I got the idea to write, Hero.  I’ve written a ton this year.

I was tired of not having Like Normal People finished.  So when I realized that I only had three months left until NaNoWriMo this year, I decided to set goals: finish Like Normal People in August, finish another one of my WIPs in September, and finish another one in October.  I have another partially finished novella that I’m setting aside until 2019, and it looks like I should scale down my goals and only do one of my WIPs in September/October.  So right now I hope to finish the first draft of Hero next month, and polish it in October.

In addition to not publishing until I’m done, I also learned a little bit about making stories a little bit more exciting while working on this.  When I originally envisioned this story, it was going to be a short story where everything moves quickly to the happily ever after.  I think how it actually turned out was a lot better.

I’ve learned even more this year.  Hopefully it will show when I finish my as-yet unpublished stories.

The other day I saw a Twitter post asking how many novels someone had written before they had gotten published.  This was after reading Paperfury’s post where she said that she had written 30 novels before getting published.  I thought I hadn’t written much at all, but then I realized that I had actually written more than I thought I had.  I’ve written nowhere near 30, but I have written 7 novels/novellas now, which really surprises me:

• How I Lost _______ (I’m not going to mention the band’s name here) in 11th grade (novella)
• Save the Best for Last – 12th grade (this one had a soundtrack with it) (novella)
• Selfless – Divergent Fanfiction where Tris chooses Abnegation instead of Dauntless (novella)
• Dauntless – Continuation of Selfless.  Follows the alternate history of Insurgent (short novel; I won NaNoWriMo 2014 with this)
• Republican Phenoms – Legend fanfiction where Daniel (Day) is given the trial score that he deserves (novella)
• My New Best Friend – Legend/Divergent fusion fanfic where Day and June live in the Divergent universe and choose Dauntless (novella)
• Like Normal People – Legend fanfic where I continue past the Champion epilogue; not canon with Life After Legend or Life After Legend II (short novel)
  

I finished the last three this year.

Well, that’s enough celebrating.  Tomorrow I’ll start making the last few chapters of Like Normal People look good so I can finish publishing it.  Then I’ll continue worldbuilding my NaNoWriMo 2018 project and finish up another one of my WIPs.