So here’s where it all ends. This is the end of the 8th book I’ve written for 2021. Everyone says “you can’t do that!”, yet I do it regularly. I’ve never hit 8 before but if I pushed myself, I figure I could do 9 for 2022. I don’t know if I’m that crazy. I guess we’ll have to see.

So here are the final totals for the book:

Monday, December 13 – Honestly, I’m not pushing myself hard in these last days because I don’t really feel like I have to. I’m ahead of schedule and, if I’m right, I should finish up on Tuesday. That includes going back to wrap up chapter 23. Today, I finished 26, wrote all of 27 and am now on the final chapter. It’s all finished except for the denouement and I’m not positive how long that will be. I wound up with 6547 words for the day and 424 pages overall. I can’t really complain.

Tuesday, December 14 – It’s  actually a weird feeling to write “The End” at the end of the book, get that adrenaline high and then realize that you still have work to do. I’m still going to go back to chapter 23 and write another 1500-2000 words to finish it up but I’ve already finished the last chapter. Back to work! In the end, I got through 6322 words for the day and my overall total for the entire book, pre-editing, is 119,523 words and 448 pages. It will be longer when I come back to it at the end of January. That’s not far off from my original estimate of 120k, is it? I’m really pretty good at predicting these things.

Wednesday, December 15 – Today, I started editing the second book in this trilogy and have made it through 9 chapters. I added close to 1000 words. It will be another month or so until I get back around to this one, but I remember thinking as I was writing the end, just how much I liked the way it was going. I actually like my own books. I will read them for pleasure if I have time and don’t have too many other commitments. They always say to write the books that you want to read and I do. It’s a good thing so many other people like to read them too.

I still have to edit this before it goes to my beta readers which, I decided to give a break over the holidays and won’t be sending out the first book until after the 1st. I’ll probably get better results that way anyhow. That will add another couple of thousand words to the manuscript since I always write light and then, that’s another series in the can and my 8th completed book for the year. Right now, it looks like I’m in the mid 800k range for the year, which is fine because I don’t actually care about annual totals. We’ll see for sure once I hit my year wrap up numbers.

So that’s what happens when I write a book, day-by-day. This one, officially, took 16 days to write nearly 120k words. That was about 7400 words a day on average, although I really don’t care much about that. So long as I hit my 5k, I’m happy. Now, I’m going to finish editing my last book, which I’ll have done by Friday and then, I’ll plan my next by Christmas and take the last week of the year off. It’s been a while since I’ve done that.