Done.
Done. Done. Donedonedonedonedone.
Start date: November 4, 2012
Actual days writing the story: 143 (so not counting days I worked on something else, or didn't write at all)
Average words per day that I worked on it: 1,274
Ending word count: 182,235.
Yowch. Time to go find my axe, because I've got some serious pruning to do. I've also got 266 markers to go back and check or correct or fill in. To keep myself from bogging down (or getting sucked into the internet for an entire evening), I tend to put an asterisk on things that don't matter but need to be right later. Sometimes it's a character's name, sometimes a direction (is the city north or south?). Every once in a while, it's a particularly tricky bit of dialogue. Rituals, songs, and stories, for example, often get asterisked, because I have to be in the right frame of mind to write them. And since the wording of them rarely matters, there's no point killing my momentum to stop and think about it. Now I have to start thinking about them.
But I don't care right now, because I'm DONE! I haven't finished a novel since I was thirteen. There were plenty of times where I wanted to give up on this one, but I didn't! I'm actually having a little trouble wrapping my brain around it. And here I was just talking about milestones....