Finished! Well, the first draft!

At about 12:25 a.m. this morning, I finished my novel Radwinter! I started it as part of the national Novel Writing Month challenge on November 1st; the idea of the challenge was to complete 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. I was delighted, but very surprised that I managed to complete 73,000 words in thirty days. I was so enjoying my writing,and so inspired, I continued, almost obsessively, and now, on the 8th of January I have finished.

Now of course the hard work begins; I’m sure apart from mistakes, typos, grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors, there will be plot-holes, inconclusive story lines, inconsistencies… and, as I discovered last night, name changes… someone changed from Sasha to  Victoria to Sammy, someone else changed from Shula, to Sasha to Vicky… and one of the characters acquired a middle name and then discarded it…

This novel is different from others I have written as some of it is based on facts… well, pseudo facts; the story involves genealogical research, so I’ve had to check on a few things like census returns, etc and I must make sure I’m consistent and have al  my ‘facts’ correct! I have pages and pages of charts… and now I need to create a diary or calendar to make sure all the dates from the past, and the time scale of the present action are correct.

It will be hard work… long hours… but I’m looking forward to it!