About ten years ago, after becoming fed up with the limited selection of novels my local library stocked that weren’t large print Mills & Boon romances or Westerns, I decided to write my own. Last night, or in the early hours of this morning, I finally finished the first draft.

 That’s not to say I’ve spent the whole of the last ten years writing it. I wrote a large part of it in 1998, and didn’t return to it until 2003 or 2004 when I finally got myself a computer that worked. Like Douglas Adams, I prefer tying in a word processor to writing longhand, mainly because as I can touchtype, my hands can keep up with my train of thought more successfully. I put it to one side once again, until one night in conversation with a friend we touched on our respective attempts at writing. Bob told me he’d written 100,000 words of his novel, a figure that boggled my mind at the time, stuck as I was on 14,000. He suggested I try and write at least 1000 words a day, just to bulk up the body.

 More often than not I didn’t manage to meet that target, as circa 85,000 words in two years means that there were many nights when I wasn’t writing a bloody thing. But still I set myself the somewhat meaningless target of 100,000, just because it was a nice round number, and because it was slightly longer than the debut novels by some of my favourite authors. I also wanted to prove I had the stamina to write a novel, and I needed to stop sometime, so this is a good a time as any.

My plan now is to have a little break from writing. In addition to this so-called book, I’ve written two children’s stories as part of the NaNoWriMo, and I’m feeling a bit tired about it. In addition, I’ve started having more and more ideas that are better suited to another idea that’s been germinating in my head, so I might indulge myself in that. In any case, I plan on having a guilt-free (as in oh my god I should be writing) spell away from this story, to let it bed down before I start the editing/second draft process.

 Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a long way to go before I’ll be happy to let anyone else see it, never mind submit it for publication. I’ve written it in a very odd way, and some bits and bobs need to go in different places for it to make sense. Still, most of it’s there, and I think the makings of a good novel are there. I just have to bring all the ingredients together successfully. This may be the hard part.

It was birthday yesterday as well, providing another reason to get the draft finished. I am now 28, and I’m feeling oddly sanguine about it. I think I had become stymied about being 27, an age I associated with death due to the various rock stars that have popped their clogs at said age. Just like the 100k target, my age always holds too much of a significance for me. 27 was my dark year, the turning from still a boy into undeniably a man. 28 is no longer an age where one can claim to be naive, or green, at least not to me. Late 20s lead to the big 3-0, which I’m a little more relaxed about than ever. I’m getting older, but I’m not that old…yet.