This should be an exciting day, I suppose, but really it's just a harbinger for what's to come.
I now have the first drafts of both my novel "Hot Pressed" and my novella, "The Rubber Order," completed. "Hot Pressed" has come in at about ~109,000 words, while "The Rubber Order" was over 50,000 last I checked.
From previous experience, "Hot Pressed" could grow another 5,000 words at the end of the editing process, which really makes the story too long. I have a candidate chapter I could cut, but I would have to write an alternate, shorter scene to make it work if I do that.
What I'm planning on doing instead is to edit everything first, then consider trying to cut out some bulk. We'll see how that works.
This is all to say that I now have ~160,000 words to read and edit, which is easily two novels worth. This won't be a quick process, so the best I can say is that it'll probably be 3-4 months before I'm even ready to think about publishing.
Since that's so far out, in theory I could write something shorter to fill in the gaps, but then there will be EVEN MORE for me to edit. Ha ha!
I'm not sure if that is feasible. We shall see. There certainly are a lot of random ideas burbling around, but no clear short story plot at the moment. (As short as my stories ever get!)
At any rate, I haven't given up. I'm still working on these projects!
