I’m happy to announce that on my current, most dedicated attempt to write a novel, I’ve now passed the half-way point of what is seemingly considered a safe word count for new authors.
There’s still plenty to do yet, of course. This is an adventure/action/horror (/sci-fi?) tale and the protagonist hasn’t even gotten to the main thrust of the story yet.
Nor am I close to actually finishing the first draft, let alone going through it any number of times to edit and tweak and adjust and rewrite as needed before even being ready to show it around to beta readers, which can just start the tweaking and editing process anew (as said previously, writing a novel is a marathon, not a sprint).
But!
One should absolutely celebrate notable personal accomplishments, and even getting this far, especially given my days of needing to be on-hand to help with kiddo with her virtual schooling, plus doing household chores, plus being a husband and the go-to food planner and cooker–all of which takes time and, good lord, energy–this much progress, on basically a side project, certainly counts as an accomplishment.
It also has given me a new boost of spirit for the work, as (creative) accomplishments tend to do for me.
All good stuff.
Onward!
The image at the top of the post may be a bit confusing to some, so to explain: Bon Jovi’s arguably best known song, that you’ve almost certainly heard at some point in the three and a half decades since its release, Livin On a Prayer, has a chorus that goes, “Whoooooa, we’re half way there/Whooooo-OA! Livin on a prayer”
I saw someone post that top image on Twitter, to visually swap out Livin on a prayer to Pigeon on a pear. (Props to that someone, Jamie McKiernan, who’s an illustrator and seems to be the only source of the image I could find, so is perhaps the very creator of it.)
There are plenty of other versions of people doing “lemon on a pear” instead, which I grant sounds more akin to the actual lyrics, but I daresay they aren’t as amusing nor accompanied by as cute an illustration.