Prehistory numbers

11. 2008. 157. 1.5. 6. What do these numbers mean?

Eleven years ago I decided to write a modern take on King Arthur. I had some aspirations that I could write a television series, and it started with a pilot. The pilot let me work out some ideas, but not long after starting the draft, disaster struck. The hard drive to my first Mac PowerBook failed and I lost a month of data, including most of the pilot. To this day, I still have the drive in my office, but thankfully back then I had become enamored of a certain notebook where I kept research notes.

Two years later in late 2008, I was noodling around on Six Apart's Vox social blog, which mentioned the contest-that's-really-a-discipline called National Novel Writing Month. Write 50,000 words in the thirty days of November? Interesting. I signed up, gathered my notes, put together an index card outline and wrote. Oddly enough, I achieved the goal, but stopped with less than half a novel. NaNoWriMo kept recurring annually, so I wrote more material for the next four years. Nothing was complete. Throw in a military deployment, executive MBA program and two family additions and you get a recipe for procrastination. Yet the idea never left me.

A year and a half ago, I wanted to check off some long overdue personal goals. From all the NaNoWriMos I'd written, I put the first rough draft together and reworked the material into a 157,000 page first draft. It was ugly, but it was my first complete novel and I knew I had enough material for three.

One and a half years and six drafts later, the novel is publishable. Until 3.18.17 ARCs will be free on Instafreebie if you want to grab one.