Earlier this week I turned in my novel.

Not just an electronic copy, but a printed one as well. 261 pages. It felt weird to print something that large and think, “I wrote all of those words.” I don’t think I ever printed out either of my first two books. Even though 52,500 words puts this book closer to a novella in size than a true novel, I’m still pretty happy with the length. It took me two years to write Commodork, which has 59,000 words, and another two years to write Invading Spaces, which has just over 63,000 words. 52,500 in roughly three months isn’t bad.

I’ve been working on this post off and on for two three days now because I’m having a hard time summarizing everything I’m feeling. As far as my school is concerned, the novel is done. In a week or two I will get my grade back, but the work has been done. I don’t know if I will do more work on it or not in the future. I don’t feel like this is “the” novel for me. It started off as an idea that I plugged a couple of characters into to make it work. I didn’t love the characters, and I think the final product shows. I’ve learned a lot over the past four months while working on this project, and I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is, it’s important to create characters that the reader cares about.

After kicking things around for a couple of days, I think I’ll be closing down this mini-blog after I get my final grade. If the novel’s done, I should stop talking about it. Right now I kind of don’t want to stop talking about it. I suspect this is what empty nest syndrome feels like. I’ll export all of these posts and import them over on my main blog, RobOHara.com.

I’m supposed to get my grade back next Thursday, so I’ll probably do one final post after that and then close things down over here. Thank you to everybody who joined me on this journey and gave feedback along the way. For everyone who subscribed to the mailing list, I’ll be sending out copies of the draft later this afternoon.