Last week, I completed the first draft of a book for the very first time. I've been doing creative writing since I was a kid, and apart from short stories, I've never finished writing something, much less an entire book. I still haven't quite processed it.
I'm not able to afford an editor or proofreader, so I am relying on friends and family to read through it for me. And I am also finding it very difficult to wait before going through it myself to work on a second draft, I know a stretch of time is normally advised and I am already impatient.
It's not a story I had expected to want to publish, as I began to write it just for two of my friends to read. We made up the characters together when we were 13 and 14 with the purpose of playing pretend before we started to feel too old to do so.
Years later, with all three of us living far from each other, I revisited the characters, feeling nostalgic for the time where we were all together and thinking them up together. While daydreaming about different scenarios I had jotted down very clumsily as a young teen, I started to think about how these scenarios could be made better of more fun, and that turned into actual storylines.
After asking my friends if they would be interested in reading stories starring these old characters we'd created, I started planning. I rebuilt the characters from the ground up, though they each retain the vibe we all wanted them to have when we were younger; I made up a place for them all to live and came up with how they all met, then accidentally gave them all way more to do and so much more backstory than originally intended.
Eventually, I ended up with plans for an entire series of stories, and each story started to feel longer and longer until I realised I had enough for a book series. This first draft is 25 chapters stretched across a couple hundred pages long, and over 83,000 words, which is a far longer story than I had intended on making it.
Because the characters are so personal to me and my friends, and because it feels so much like a "inside" thing -- not an inside joke, mind you, but just something that only belonged in the friend group -- I never considered publishing it. But why not? I had fun coming up with it with my friends, I had fun writing it, so sharing that fun with others might just amplify the fun me and my friends have (also I've just always wanted to publish a book, and this is the very first one I've ever completed).
Anyway. I assume the next step is to get feedback from a couple of readers, do at least one more draft, get more feedback, and then publish it. I suppose. I'll do an e-book to start off with. Woo.
To be honest, I still am not sure how to feel about it. I've wanted to finish a story for such a long time that now that I've done it I'm just stuck like, "Now what?"