And it's done! The final draft of my novel, SPIRIT QUEST, is done!

The final draft of my novel, SPIRIT QUEST, is done. It clocks in around 99,100 words.

I have two Alpha Readers going through the manuscript now and need to recover their comments. When they're done with that, I'll have a read through of the entire thing. But, I want to put a bit of distance between myself and the manuscript. I'm also hoping to cut it down to 98,000 words.

As for how I feel? I'm pretty damn happy. It's been a long road. The idea for this novel surfaced over two years ago. The core of the novel was written in 2012's NaNoWriMo. In 2013, I had an opportunity to pitch the novel and it was well received which prompted me to take that 50,000 and craft it into a real novel. I had a 5,000 word document just of the one-line descriptions of all the little bits and pieces in the story I needed to fix. And that's done!

I know I'm not done done. I can expect at least two more rounds of significant editing (one from the agent and one from the publisher), but I'm taking a moment to enjoy where am. I can look back at 2012 and the two plus years it's taken me to get here with this nice, big, beautiful manuscript and take a deep breath.

Up next, I'm going to spend some time brainstorming ideas for the second and third novels. I also have another project that I NaNoWriMo'ed in 2011, ELEGANT DARKNESS.