I won’t say it’s like giving birth, but I finished my latest labor. Apropos that today is Labor Day in the US.

After writing 332,191 words, I have finished the sequel to Weekend Plans. (Well, at least the first draft of it.) Honestly I was putting off writing the last scene, but a few days ago I woke up at 4:30am and couldn’t sleep, so I cranked it out, along with the final three pages that come after it.

Why are there four numbers? Because apparently Google Docs can only handle so large of a document before the find function stops working with any sort of alacrity. I got tired of waiting 10-15 seconds when I was searching for a page, so I broke my draft down into four files: pages 1-99, 100-199, 200-299, and 300+. Those four numbers above are the final word counts for each section.

What comes next? Well, the usual rereading, editing, and rewriting, which will take a while (this is literally the longest book of any sort I’ve ever written), but first I need to find people to playtest the game — start from page 1 and go through the entire thing multiple times, to make sure nothing repeats itself or loops back multiple times. I think I managed that with the flowcharts, but it never hurts to check, especially with a book that has 420 distinct “pages”. (For these purposes, a “page” is a line in my outline where one or more things occur. Some “pages” are very brief, and some can be up to 1000 words, which is about four actual book pages.)

I’m going to post a few scenes from the book, I think, in the coming days, just so you can get a feel for what I’ve been working on.

But for now… labor completed. And all I can say is: “whew!”