A. Marie Silver

A. Marie Silver

Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About

Who would have thought there are rules to blogging?  Yes, in fact there are.  One of the many don’ts of blogging is that you are never supposed to talk about why you haven’t been blogging.  Apparently it’s in poor taste.  Don’t ask me why.  I don’t make the rules.  But I do follow the rules…usually.

So…I won’t talk about why I haven’t been blogging.  I won’t tell everyone that three weeks ago I came down with the world’s most annoying cold that turned into laryngitis and today, three weeks later, I’m only 60% recovered.

I also won’t talk about how my nine month old has been teething miserably and that even though he still manages to sleep through the night he wakes up exhausted, rubbing his eyes while I’m changing his diaper.

I also won’t tell everyone about the green soup I made last week and how I was really worried it wouldn’t turn out and quietly wondered if there was a pizza place that could deliver on base because it was after 7pm and the baby was already in bed.  FYI – the soup turned out great but I’m still not going to talk about it because I’m not supposed to…and no one really cares.

I will, however, talk about how I’ve been working faithfully on my novel and today….this very day in history…I finished the first draft of my first novel (another reason why I haven’t been blogging but you didn’t hear that from me).

It was ten years ago that I first came up with the idea behind this novel.  Unfortunately I couldn’t do much with it because my inconsiderate college courses took up most of my time and then after graduation I had to go out and get a job and the job I got didn’t allow me to work on my novel while I was on the clock. Rude!

Two years ago I started working on this novel again, sending chapters to my husband (boyfriend at the time) who was deployed.  He needed something funny to read and I needed something to do.  But then he came home seven months later and we got married, bought house and had a baby.  What can I say?  It was a busy year.

November of 2012 was the first time I participated in the National Novel Writing Month.  I couldn’t use the scenes and chapters I’d already written (rules for participation) so I had to come up with all new material.  And so I did.  By the end of the month I had written somewhere between 53,000 and 55,000 words.

Today, my ending word count for the first draft was 88,636 words.  It took ten years for me to transition from a sort-of, kind-of, wanna-be writer to an actual writer.  Who would have thought that after ten years, all I really needed was one National Novel Writing month to light the fire that would keep burning?

If you’re asking yourself what 88,636 words means then you’ve come to the right place.  I stumbled on a blog on the Internet that listed the word count of some well-known published novels.

The link I used is http://indefeasible.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/great-novels-and-word-count/.

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Remarque was 61,922

1984, by George Orwell was 88,942

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger was 73,404

I also found on http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081228060156AA7JS9K that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling was 76,944

and on the same website Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was 85,141

Obviously my word count is going to change during the editing process but right now I’m walking tall at 88,636 words.  Just in case you’re dying to know how many pages that is, according to the Scrivener software I used it’s roughly 297 pages (assuming 300 words to a page) in a paperback format.

Well look at that!  I found something to talk about after all!

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A. Marie Smith

Your short bio telling the story of why you are a writer and the things that you think are important.