Congratulations!!! So inspiring. I've been cobbling away at my book for 2.5 years, in spare time. I have 400 pages of maybe 1/2 a shitty first draft - so I imagine I'll need 1000 pages of crap before I can reverse engineer and pare down to something readable.
How long did it take you to do your book? Can I ask if you 'overwrote' or 'underwrote' in your draft?
So inspired !!! Amazing to watch someone making their thoughts become things :-)
(Ps. In my efforts to give you a 100% upvote, I forgot I'd already upvoted at my default of 59% - and then took it away...so my 100% seems like it was worth less. I wasn't being a jerk, just an air head ! Sorry about that.)
hahaha you're totally fine!! Thank you for the comment. My book took about a year to get everything done. I wrote it in about 4 months and then the rest was just edits and cover work. I wrote about a 436 page book. About 120,000 word, I would say that I could have written more but everything I needed to get out I did! And I am so happy about that. Im excited to write another one. What would your book be about?
4 months! My god...hangs head. Was writing it pretty much your whole life for that time? Did you follow an outline? (I'll bet if I go looking through your blog I'll find answers to my questions...please hold lol)
Mine is also memoir...a crazy year in Dubai back in 2004/2005 when I was 21/22 working in media and trying to cover human rights/taboos (prostitution, 'slave labor', etc) - this is back before most of the US had even heard of Dubai - so, at the time it hadn't been done. It explores larger issues of identity/gender - often through the lens of my own experiences (ie a lesbian relationship with a Bahraini girl whose family forced her to leave Dubai when they discovered she...gasp, liked women as more than friends)...and if I had to reduce to 2 words, it's probably about 'identity construction' - and of course, my love affair with alcohol/other stuff and how that left me in some less than ideal situations. But I also try to make it NOT about me...
Have you started your next? I'm going to go read your excerpts :-)