Akkad at 135k+ - Eeep Momen

I made it through the wilderness, oooh oooh... 

All hail Enlil! Father of creation, so divine not even the other gods may look upon him... Yeah, the more I get into this, the more I reckon the Bible would fail a TurnItIn test on ancient literature.

  

Just stumbled out of Enlil's temple at Nippur, into the bright light of Chapter Thirty.

Over 136,000 words and feeling good. The war is over and I'm back to exploring matters of the heart: friendship, love and lubricant. It has been a long, rolling conquest of Sumer, and I feel I've walked every step of that journey with grit and - hopefully - eloquent prose. However, I'm really stoked to pick up part of the story I left off many chapters ago, and to bring it all to a neat conclusion. I reckon I'm two, maybe three chapters from the end of this novel, and I'm feeling confident.

I've cleared the next couple of weeks to get this done. It's amazing how relaxed and well you feel when you have a project you're engrossed in, and you have the time to work on it without distraction. I've become very protective of my hours. I can see the end, I'm running towards it. 

Thanks for sticking with me. I know it's exceedingly dull to listen to writers whinge about how hard writing is - but it is. I mean, it can be. It can be super simple when things are going well, words just fall onto the page, but when you lose that spark it becomes a real slog. Ironically, most of us get through difficult writing by writing about how difficult writing is... it's a weird type of therapy. Possibly unhealthy.

I reckon the rest of this one will be fairly plain sailing now, though. It's an ending that I'm looking forward to, because it sets up the next novel very nicely. It seems crazy to be thinking about doing this all again so soon, but this novel was only ever supposed to have been an introduction to the next one - it just ran away from me a little. Despite the lengthy invasion, and battles not really being my forte as a writer, I have enjoyed myself immensely with this one. It's funny, when you get to the end, you sort of forget a lot of what went into it and you're just proud to have a finished book. 

Onward!