As of about ten minutes ago, The Curse of Steel is finished in first draft, coming in at just over 90,000 words.

For me, this is a pretty remarkable milestone. I’ve written and published a couple million words over the years, but this is the first time I’ve managed to write a full-length genre novel that is:

1. Mature enough for a general audience (as opposed to the first novel I wrote, when I was twelve);
2. Publishable (as opposed to the second novel I wrote, which used a whole pile of problematic tropes); and
3. Not fan-fiction (as opposed to the third through seventh novels I wrote, which got lots of readers but will never earn me a dime).

Now the hard work starts. The first draft is the “plot draft,” where I work out the story for the first time. It’s certainly readable as is – I flatter myself that my prose style is fairly clean – but it’s not as tight as it needs to be. Now I need to go back and do an almost complete rewrite, turning the bare-bones narrative into something that will grab and hold readers’ attention.

Still. I think I will take a few hours and celebrate.