Done.

Guys. The first draft is done.
It weighs in at 127 pages, 36650 words, and it needs so much polishing and another 8K words if I wanna publish.
But the first draft is done.

100 pages!

 Look at this, guys! I have officially written a hundred pages.

 

That's 58% of the way to 50K words. 

I did another pie chart based on the end goal of 45K words, which is about the shortest you can still publish a novel. That gives me 65%.

Ahhh!

I'm unexpectedly upon the climax. Will I be able to stretch it and the denoument out into enough words to publish? Stay tuned to find out!

August update

GUYS. I just hit fifty percent. 25000 words.

Jimena has just showed up at Bryn Mawr to confront Lee.
In other news, I've sent my poetry chapbook in to four different poetry contests, a play to another, and a short story to another.
The short story contest tho. Here's a copy of the first paragraph of my cover letter.

I was extremely excited to discover Twisted Road Publications and its short fiction contest. Twisted Road’s tagline, “Bringing Marginalized Voices Into the Mainstream,” exactly describes what I aim to do with all my work. As a queer, chronically ill, feminine person, I have some experience with marginalization and feel very strongly about working to improve visibility and challenge common narratives. The Southern Gothic Anthology contest marries my mission to my style—the contest page’s description of Southern Gothic is the closest description of my genre that I have ever encountered. From childhood I’ve written tragedy-ridden depictions of people misunderstood by society, and have always struggled to find a niche for my work. Discovering that Dorothy Allison was the final judge was the absolute icing on the cake. I have greatly admired Ms. Allison’s work for several years now, and in fact wrote my college essay on my relationship with an essay of hers, “This Is Our World,” which put into words for the first time how I felt about the purpose of art: to challenge the viewer’s comfortable perception of their world.

This is not me trying to butter up the judges, this is pure enthusiasm.