Tyler Hillis

Continuing on into the great unknown. I’ve now passed 200 pages of my book and nearing the big climax. I’m anticipating another 100 or so to wrap everything up.

I realize pages aren’t the best way to measure length since they can vary in format. A better measurement is word count, which I am currently sitting at 58,257. That’s a lot of words!

To give some comparison, the first Harry Potter book is at about 76,000 words and the first Lord of the Rings book is at 187,000 words.

Now obviously, word count doesn’t equal quality. I would take 20,000 words of amazing storytelling over 100,000 words of boring dribble. But as I’ve said before, this is by far the largest amount of writing I’ve ever done for a single project, and so my curiosity for comparison was aroused.

I’ve continued to write for a minimum of one hour every day throughout December. Some days, I drag my feet and only produce 700-800 words in that hour. Other days, I get into a trance and time fades away and when I look up, I’ve written 1,700 words. My rough estimate is an overall average of 1,000 words per day, 7 days a week.

As I near the latter stages of the story, I’m interested to go back to the first few chapters I wrote and compare the writing quality to that of my current sections. If I ran every single day for a month and a half I would be in much better shape than when I started, and I believe it’s the same with writing. I’ll probably have an extensive revision period focused solely on bringing the quality in line with the rest of the book.

But I’ll worry about that when I come to it. For now, I’m still discovering more about these characters and how exactly they walk the path I’ve set in place for them. I’ve become extremely attached to each one and there is a different, deeper level of pain that occurs when tragedy strikes them. When they aren’t characters of another author’s creation, and instead of my own, their fate is my fault. On a couple occasions now I’ve walked away from a writing session misty eyed and emotionally drained. I just hope even a fraction of that reaction can be felt by the future reader.

I’ve loved every day of doing this and feel as though I’ve finally found my outlet for expression. Even if this book becomes lost to time without ever being read by others, it has helped one person’s life. So that is quite an accomplishment.