In case you didn't know, I'm a writer. This past summer, a little over six years since I started fiction writing, I finished the first draft of a novel for the first time in my life. As of now, pre-revision, it's almost 59 thousand words long.

I know what you're wondering: How long did that take? Well, it took either eight months or five years, depending on how you look at it.

This first draft specifically took me eight months, with breaks to focus on school and refuel my creative outputs with creative inputs (reading books, doodling, crocheting a midlife-crisis blanket, etc.). But the story contained in that first draft is one I’ve been trying to capture since freshman year of high school. The story, a coming-of-age tale of two teens helping each other untangle the knots of the past to figure out the future, was born from the over-analysis of a Coldplay album. It started as a feeble attempt at what I like to call “modernized dystopia”, and it was 23 thousand mediocre words that didn’t come close to capturing the image in my head of these characters. It was “done” in the sense that the storyline ended, but it wasn’t done right.

Fast forward to my sophomore year of high school. I spent about two weeks condemned to my bed, and bed rest led to a lot of rereading of this story I couldn’t get out of my head. I thought of ways to pull it as far away from the “modernized dystopia” nonsense as possible, and these ideas had me excited to start over. Then I did what any normal person does when they can’t get out of bed without getting dizzy with sickness: I started writing.

Within those twelve-ish days, I wrote 22 thousand words that I still can’t say I hated. Up to that point, it was the closest I had been to getting it right.

Before long, I had 47 thousand words.

Soon after that, I had extreme writer’s block and a beyond-dead dinosaur computer (long story).

Although I eventually got over the writer’s block and acquired a newer, significantly younger computer, I didn’t think about that story again until last October. I was laying in bed attempting to fall asleep when these characters began to plague my mind. I shot up in bed and started scribbling down all these ideas with a sort of reckless abandon enhanced by the fact that I couldn't see anything in the pitch black dorm room.

After some intense deciphering of my chicken scratch the next morning, I knew I was ready. I was finally in the right place to write this story, and write it right.

As I begin the revising stage of my journey with this story-turned-novel, I know that I am going the distance this go-round. The end of this first draft is only the beginning.