I finished the second edition today!

24 chapters for Book 1. 177K words. First edition locked. Second edition in progress. Up to now: 20/24 chapters locked after the second edition. What does editing do to me? Basically, I’m jumping back and forth between “I’m so good at this!” and “This sucks!” and “I’m gonna cry” and “This doesn’t make sense.”

And then falling into the eternal loop of “I’m never finishing this” and “maybe it needs a third, fourth, fifteenth edition pass.”

I just had the last hammer of my Eight of Pentacles moment. 177K words and 24 chapters. I have to say, nothing miraculous happened in the moment I typed the last period. But then, and I still can’t believe it, the sky opened, and a storm poured down. I heard Neptune has entered my sign today? So this is what it feels like when there’s alignment between the universe and me. First draft is finished. I have a complete book in my hands now.

As a good business analyst who writes user stories and documentation for a living, I think it would be a nice practice to document this journey, the one I’m sailing through while writing a book.

Is it my first? No. That was more than 20 years ago, written in Chinese. It’s not even my second book. But I didn’t write about it back then, and now I think it would be nice to track every part of the process because it’s something that makes me happy.

The story genre… I believe it is an adult romantic fantasy in a secondary world, with political intrigue and a restrained fantasy texture…? But I will say, it started as a “smut romance” with an arranged marriage as a premise, and then evolved into a court plot, and then into a world plot, because my mind just works that way.

I currently have 15 chapters in my first draft. Let’s see how it goes.