Estyria is my first finished book in English.
I first thought of the idea in college, I misremember if it was junior or senior year. I wrote about 12k or 20k and stalled out because I couldn’t write and do college and work at the same time. This would be either 2007 or 2008.
Fast forward to November of 2008. It was National Novel Writing Month and I decided that I really wanted to “win” NaNoWriMo for once. Utterly disregarding the rules about not being allowed to use previous subject matter, I decided it wouldn’t really be cheating if I wrote an additional 50k words.
Yes, yes, I know, you may now retroactively retract my winners badge, which I don’t have or use anyways because I still feel a bit guilty over it…
I finished NaNoWriMo at 75k words or thereabout and still not finished. Now what?
I decided to make up all the sleep I lost because of doing NaNoWriMo while also working full-time as a receptionist before making further inroads into this project that just. wouldn’t. die.
Two months later, I went back to Estyria and pretty much had a minor meltdown about how much editing it needed. Note: NaNoWriMo is really, really not a good idea for me because I ended up writing a ton of crap that was just there because my brain thought it was a good idea and interesting and it was filler.
Discouraged by just how bad it was, I went and hid in a hole for a while.
If I ever get published, I just might allow fans, if I have any, to read the original which was pretty amazingly bad.
Sometime in May 2010 I started thinking seriously about finishing it because, dammit, I wanted to know the ending too.
In June, I joined DII, or Dreaming In Ink, an online writer’s workshop and started writing in earnest.
Readers, I scrapped almost the entirety of the first pre-draft of Estyria. There are a few scenes here and there that are from the original and the entire first chapter is all but lifted from that corpse — but I doubt I salvaged more than 12k from that sad husk.
I finished the alpha draft of Estyria, book 1 on March 20, 2010.
So, from start to finish, strictly speaking it took about 3 years.
We’ll see how long editing takes. *coughs. chokes. dies*