The bulletin board in my office is filled with all sorts of random things - pictures of Marsha P. Johnson and Ella Pepper, postcards of favorite art pieces, business cards, cheese wrappers from a trip to France, and various poems and inspirational quotes. There’s also a card with four words written by hand: SPRINT THE FIRST DRAFT.
I don’t remember where specifically I first heard that. It was one of the many writing workshops and webinars I’ve taken over the years. And every now and then, I’d look at it and feel all gung ho about getting things done. Most of the time, though, I ignored it. I’d sprint one day. Not today.
Instead, I crawled.
And this year, I finally finished the first draft of a novel that has taken me 12 years to write.
That’s right. I started back in 2013. That’s when I sat on a plane and wrote a scene in my little notebook. The idea itself had been percolating for years before that. I’d spent years thinking about a story from my hometown and wondered “What if?” When I finally wrote those first words in 2013, I needed to get something out but I had no idea where the story was going.
It fell onto the back burner for a couple of years. I didn’t know where it was heading and I convinced myself I was a non-fiction writer. What did I know about writing a novel? After all, I went to writing conferences and heard authors talk about their characters speaking to them. Mine didn’t seem to say anything.
In 2015, I took an online course with the Iowa Writers Workshop. I don’t know if they still offer it, but it was a wonderful free course and very beneficial. It left me with a series of individual scenes and some good feedback that helped me firm them up. I felt inspired.
But I still had no idea where it was going. And eventually I told myself that I couldn’t write anything else as good as some of those scenes.
And so it continued.
Each year I’d make a resolution that this would be the year I’d finish that book. Other things got in the way and, truth be told, I was more than happy to let them. I wrote other books in the meantime. I finished the first draft of a cozy mystery - one that I’m still editing and in the process of expanding. But the novel? I even had a name for it that came to me in a dream. Meanwhile, I’d convince myself that I couldn’t do it. And no, the lockdown during Covid did not lead to my completing the great, mythical novel. I’d write a scene here and there. And that was that.
And now here we are in 2025. If you remember, a few months ago I said I was doing a summer challenge to write 1000 words a day for 100 days. I’m not going to make that. That’s because after writing every day for 25 days, I realized that I had kind of gone as far as I could. I had a first draft of my novel.
I’ve spent the last month editing it. It needs work. A lot of work. I write short and it needs expanding. I need to sort out my timeline. I have three rotating points of view and so I need to figure out how to organize them. But it’s nowhere near as messy as I expected. As it turns out, one large chunk that I was planning to cut - I’d already cut it years ago in one of my many, many attempts.
So it’s taken me 12 years to get this far.
But that’s ok.
It might not have been a sprint, but I still got there. There’s a long way to go, but getting this far feels good. Really, really good. And what I have now is better than what I would have written back then.
So sprint if that works for you.
Crawl if you need to. I can’t judge.
Even the slowest crawl is progress.
Other snippets…
After last week’s turnip debacle, this week we’ve been enjoying more fresh corn from the garden, alongside lots of other fresh goodies: avocados, mushrooms, spinach, stuffed peppers. Delicious!
According to a new study, milk is more hydrating than water. I’ve never been much of a milk drinker, and the thought of downing a glass of the thick white stuff on a hot day? Ew. I’ll stick with water.
Other things I read about this week:
In the Belgian town of Antwerp, residents have been given free chickens to help deal with food waste and to provide a source of eggs. It has reduced the average household waste by 50kg (about 110 lbs) per year.
There have been rumors and claimed sightings of big cats in the British countryside for as long as I can remember - the beast of Dartmoor and so on. Sometimes the claims were debunked by photo analysis proving that perspective made a regular black cat look bigger than it actually was. But, according to this article from the team at BBC Wildlife, there may indeed be black leopards roaming our rural areas. Here kitty, kitty….
This is great advice. I always seem to have multiple (too many) projects going on at any one time and a couple of them are quite old, and unfinished. I beat myself up over not getting more done especially on a few of the older projects. Thanks for saying it's okay if things take time. I hope all is well.