One of the reasons I started this project was because I was frustrated with authors talking about finishing a book in X number of days, as if only the days writing the first draft counted. In my experience, the first draft is only a portion of the work, and counting just those days is deceiving and discouraging for us newbie authors.
So here is my report. Sure, I have been distracted along the way, but it has taken me 66 days before I got the first words of my first draft on the page. And even then, part of the day was spent on pre-writing, so my word count didn’t even hit 350. But I’ve started.
If you’ve been reading along, you know that I haven’t finished my scene cards yet – not even close – and I haven’t developed my settings or my minor characters. I’m planning to do all of that just-in-time as I write. So, my first draft isn’t going to be as fast as those other authors that have everything finished in advance. But this is an experiment with a new process, so I hope it goes well!