Finally! 1794 is Done.

Yeay! As of last night I finally finished the first draft of the story I've been referring to as 1794. (That's the year the story takes place in.)

This is by far the longest "short" story I've ever done, finishing up at 14,800 words (rounded up). Before that, "Cry Wolf" at 5700 was my longest short piece.

I just completed the first read-throughs, one silent and one aloud, and now it's off to a few beta-readers.

Normally I don't do a dance of joy when I finish a short story, but this one was a bit of a bear. I started it back in July with the hope that I would have it done by the end of that month. Then my cousin died, and my writing sort of went to hell. I missed the deadline of the anthology I wanted to send the story to originally, so instead I wrote a story for a different anthology. Once I got the new story out of the way, it was back to slogging through 1794. I got majorly stuck. I was lucky to get two paragraphs done in a whole day. But, word by word the stupid thing got written out, and finally a couple of days ago the dam burst and the rest came fairly easily.

It will be interesting to see what the final word count is, after I get feedback. Also, I'm not in love with the title I picked, so for now it's still getting referred to as 1794.

I'm going to treat myself to a nice hot bath, a (small) bag of potato chips, and the research books for my next project that I've been holding in reserve as incentive to finish.

I've got at least two new projects in the pipeline, both longer pieces, and will probably try to alternate with a few shorter works as well. Basically, it's time to start on the novel prequel, and work on research for the new project also as that's going to require quite a bit of it. But I'll keep an eye out for interesting anthology projects too.

Photo courtesy of Chris Sharp and www.freedigitalphotos.net.