They say the first million is the hardest. They’re talking about money, of course, but I imagine it’s the same with wordcount. In which case, I’m about a quarter of the way to my first million.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, I finished the first draft of The Wreck of the Argyll<\/em>, my children’s novel set in Dundee during the First World War. It’s a short book – just under 32,000 words – but it was almost a surprise when I realised that it was actually my fifth<\/em> completed manuscript. That’s not bad for a touch over two years – I started\u00a0The Chimney Rabbit<\/em> in March 2012 – especially when you consider I’ve stalled badly a few times. (Half-way through The Chimney Rabbit<\/em>, I got stuck, and didn’t write for several months.)<\/p>\n I just totted up the wordcount of my five novels, and it comes to a smidgeon over 251,000 words. Just over a quarter of a million. I’m not counting any of my earlier work, my short stories, or any of the started, stalled, and abandoned novels that clutter up my archive – only novels that have been completed. Or completed to first draft, anyway.<\/p>\n Of course, the problem is still that I don’t know if any<\/em> of these quarter million words are any good. Success on the path to publication has been exactly zero – not even an encouraging nibble. But still. Never mind the quality, feel the width. Even if it’s all rubbish, it’s taken a certain amount of application to write a quarter of a million words over five books, so at least I can be proud of the effort, if not the results. I don’t know if being proud of the effort is enough motivation to keep me writing over the next few years, but you never know.<\/p>\n I’ll never have a million pounds, but at this rate I might reach a million words by sometime in 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They say the first million is the hardest. They’re talking about money, of course, but I imagine it’s the same with wordcount. In which case, I’m about a quarter of the way to my first million. Earlier this week, I finished the first draft of The Wreck of the Argyll, my children’s novel set in… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37h7H-5p","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}