Novel Writing

 

Ever since my wife and I have retired, I have taken up the hobby of writing novels which has focused on science fiction, spies, crime & violence, and general interest.  I am in my tenth year of retirement and have completed eleven novels and started five more.

I have ten pages more to write to complete my twelfth novel, leaving four unfinished to completed.  Two of the six start but not finished novels were 70% so it did not take me long to finish.  However, the other four are only 20% finished or less, so I am planning on a couple of months for each one.

With persistence, I should have the remaining four completed by the end of 2025 or the end of my tenth year of retirement.  So, it took me ten years to write 16 novels.

Bear in mind that each novel is over 100,000 words in length or about 200, 8X10 pages.  The general rule of thumb is to divide by 20 and multiply that answer by 30...  however, what it really depends upon is the type and font size and the margins that are being used.

With 11 novels written all of which are over 100,000 words, for those 11 novels, I have written over a million and a half words.  For me that is quite a lot of words.

I use Grammarly to check my spelling and sentence structure, although sometimes I have to override the corrections because I want to use slang expressions in my dialogues.

I also have Microsoft 365 which comes with CoPilot and this service can be used to rewrite your entire novel.  However, it is only good at rewritten a page at a time.  You might as well depend on adding a week to your time if you decided to use CoPilot at the end.

I have not used CoPilot yet, but if I do, it will be used from the very beginning where I write a page or two, then use CoPilot to rewrite.  I usually take my time and write 3-5 pages each day.