I may have mentioned this before, but you really have no idea how much work writing a novel takes until you actually sit down and do it. You’re looking at hours and hours of work, just to get the words down on the page and I’d say you need to at least double (if not triple) that time to get your manuscript into a state that its ready to be read.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot the last few days. We live in a time where entertainment is fast, cheap and easy to get–as such, we don’t really sit back and think about how long it takes to actually create these things.

As for writing, you can sit down and spend a full 6-8 hours working and finish less than one 1% of the final product. I’m sure there are plenty of other things that are like that, I mean, just consider the number of man hours it takes to make a movie!

This past weekend I did a couple of marathons where I spent 10+ hours writing. Going into it, I was really hoping to put most of the finishing touches on the current Penumbra manuscript–or at least, get it finished enough to send to test readers. But even after ~20 hours of work, I’ve still got a couple of chapters to write and quite a bit of editing to do. It’s insane how long the entire process takes!

My goal was to have it done by this Friday, but that may be a bit too ambitious. I’m still going to push for it, but I may have to shoot for next week instead. While it’s out there, I’m going to go back and work on polish. By that point the manuscript will be ~95% finished story-wise (leaving some room for adjustments based on feedback) but only ~40% finished polish-wise. Fortunately, polish is something that goes very quickly–at least it seems to for me. I know some authors have a harder time with polish but get the first drafts done far quicker than I do. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses I guess.

In the meantime, I’m considering re-titling it. Penumbra has always been the working title, but that’s kind of been the title of the overall story that I intend to write. The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking it doesn’t really fit this individual story itself. What the title should be though, I haven’t quite figured out yet.

I’ll figure it out, but for now, there is work to do!