So that's that, then

Technically I am now a novelist. The fact that I just had to check how many times the letter 'l' should occur in the word doesn't fill me with much confidence. But the fact remains that I have sat down and written a novel - a book of long narrative of literary prose (thank you Wikipedia).

And I've done it. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's called The Gentle Man and it topped out at just under 61,000 words. I wrote it as part of NaNoWriMo - which you probably know by now. And I've been raising money for a good cause. Which you might not have known, but now you do.

So what happens now? Well, I'm glad you asked, because I'm not entirely sure myself. I didn't write the thing with thoughts of getting it published. I did it for the fun of it, although whether sitting in my spare room wrangling sentences together with an aching backside probably doesn't count as fun.

I just re-read that last sentence and realise it looks as if I used my backside to wrangle the sentences. Clearly I didn't. I used Microsoft Word, which is pretty close.

But one thing I can say for the novel right now is this. It's pretty close to being unreadable. Oh, it's got all the novel-y things, like a plot, characters, setting, but it's really not pretty. Any novel you write in such a short space of time is going to lack any editing. And this one really does need going over once again. There are some gaps, too, things I thought about towards the end that would have been nice to have earlier on. So I'll go back and fill those in too. I reckon we'll be looking at 70,000 words in the end, which is still on the short side for a novel, these days.

Will I try and get it published? I don't know. Doesn't hurt to try, I suppose. But for the moment I'm leaving it well alone. We can enjoy more blog posts instead. Let joy be unconfined!