FINALLY Finished Longest Book Ever!

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Taylor Harbin

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My WIP is no longer IP! As of this moment, after eleven months, weighing in at 534 typed pages, my manuscript's first draft is finally FINALLY done!!!

When if first conceived this work, "The Sparrow's Fall," I thought on a grand scale: Game of Thrones meets Redwall (minus the sex and actually using real animals...) I started on Valentine's Day 2015, same day I moved into my new apartment. I was working a new job with a very unpredictable schedule, got married a month later, on top of other challenges. Then, I had a breakthrough with short stories and wanted to give up on the project all together. I realized after about 250 pages that I was way in over my head, having never written anything on this scale before with so many characters (part of me wonders if it was a mistake to go full epic-fantasy with the story, but that remains to be seen).

But now it's done and I know I can come back to it later or never again. A year has gone in the blink of an eye. I hope I'll want to come back to this world again, because I was on fire when I started. A lot of things changed. New characters appeared out of no where. The ending was not what I had planned. To be honest, it kind of puttered out. I just got up this morning and realized "Oh, it's going to end here. How 'bout that?" It was one of those, "Great. It's done. Get it out of my sight!" moments.

I could make a whole list of the things I learned whilst writing this book, but I'm just too TIRED.

Thanks to my Olivetti typewriter for not going up in smoke and to all of you you kept telling me not to quit. Now I can move on with a clean slate.
 

Sammie

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Congratulations!! Such an amazing feeling finishing that first draft! ;) ;)
 

Lucid

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I looked at your blog. It's seriously impressive seeing the size of that manuscript (in your photo!)
 

Adniel Lenal

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Well done! Accomplishing something of that size is no easy task. Hope to take a look at sometime soon.
 

atombaby

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My word!! Congratulations! I also checked out your blog and am amazed and admire your accomplishment of doing this on the typewriter. I would've asked how many words does 534 pages come out to, but I won't dare ask such now. I won't even ask how long did it take for you to count the papers. Wishing you all the best, lots and lots of luck!
 

Taylor Harbin

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Thank you Saoirse, Atom, Lenal, and Lucid!

I don't know the word count yet, but I will soon. There's this great OCR software called FineReader I'm waiting for. The trial version blew me away. I can convert a scanned PDF into a Word file! $100 well spent. Even thought I'll have to clean it up a bit, it should give me a good approximation on the length of the manuscript. I'm guessing it'll be at least 150,000+ words (I sure hope so...)
 

Taylor Harbin

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Just digitized it using FineReaderPro. Unedited word count is 181,000!
 
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