Rik's phrase of the day

"The End"

Yep, those are my favourite words right at this moment, because those are the words I found myself writing at just gone 3:00am this morning on page god-knows-how-many of the first draft of my very first science fiction novel.

And as a bonus, I also dreamed a title for the book this morning (later on; I was in bed by this time) ... The Gods in the Jungle. Snazzy, huh? The title only brings up two Google hits, so it should be safe enough to claim as my own.

Some statistics:
First word written: 1 November 2005 (All Souls' day)
Last words written: 23 March 2008 (Easter Sunday)
No of words inbetween: just over 127 thousand
No of chapters: 36 plus a short epilogue
No of sex scenes: um, two? Plus allusions to quite a few other encounters
No of point-of-view: characters: seven
No of other characters: there's a whole circus of them
No of alien monsters: the Barby Rats are cute - not monsters at all.
Happily-ever-after score: well, there's certainly a resolution for the 2 young lovers and the evil uncle ...

Anyways, there's lots to do still. Revision, for instance - though that shouldn't take too long as I've been revising for consistency and style as I go along. Then it's all the fun of submitting the tome to agents (and publishers) and waiting for them to recognise my 'genious', etc, etc, and so forth.

PS: Should I be worried about the jolly zombies in the dream that gave me my title? The royal blue rooms with bright yellow windows floating through the sky were also rather trippy. Even cutting off a zombie's face didn't kill it - luckily they were fine about the knifework, said it happened all the time and I didn't need to worry.

PPS: there's no zombies in my novel, just in case people were worrying ...