As of 5:10 p.m. on Saturday, September 30, 2023… my seventh book, On the Flip Side, is now complete!

For the inside scoop on how the last day of writing this first draft went, keep scrolling! 🙂

Getting Started Bright and Early

Let me preface this with some background information: on all my past novels, the completion days were absolutely hectic. Why? Because I always underestimated how much more of the story I needed to write and ended up allotting myself plenty of material to write on those last days… as in thousands of words worth. For example, The Dream‘s last three writing days totaled in at 8,707 words, which is not normal for Miss Overeager Allyson… *facepalm*.

Not my brightest planning moment.

So, for On the Flip Side, I planned ahead and made sure I would only have two short chapters and the epilogue to write on the last planned writing day. Easy peasy.

However, I still ended up beginning the writing day bright and early, around 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., if I remember correctly. Why? Because my husband’s bowling league team had to make up a game they missed a couple weeks ago, and they scheduled it for the middle of the day. Since I normally go watch him bowl on league nights, I wanted to go to the make-up game, and that meant I had to get to writing.

Writing in my pajamas on the couch, I managed to do five writing sprints of around 20 to 30 minutes each, which allowed me to finish writing the final two chapters. The total word count for the morning writing session was 2,272 words.

Yeehaw.

I figured that was a good stopping point until we got back, so then I got ready for the day and we ventured off to the bowling alley.

…A Few Hours Later

While the make-up game didn’t take that long, we live half an hour from the bowling alley, so that made for an hour round-trip. We also ate with Josh’s team after the game, so we were gone in total about three and a half hours. When we got back home around four, my laptop wanted to be a slow poke after updating before we left, so I waited on it to load for a while and then got back to writing around 4:30ish.

I planned on the epilogue being short as well, so I set a timer for a thirty-minute sprint and was able to get it written during that time, coming in at 521 words, making the grand total word count for On the Flip Side 84,658 words!

Is the first draft perfect? Absolutely not. I’ve already thought of a couple things I need to go back in and add to it once edits start, but that won’t be for a while. So, in the meantime, I’m going to make notes of those things and will hopefully remember to implement them later. 🙂

Overall, On the Flip Side‘s last writing day was by far the easiest novel completion day I’ve ever had, and I thank God for that, because this novel has been quite the journey to write. I got the idea for the novel in January 2014, almost ten years ago! I didn’t make it a dedicated writing project until March of 2022, so it took over a year and a half to write.

Oh Yeah…. I Also Made a Reel to Document the Day!

For some reason, Instagram posts are having trouble embedding on Authoring Arrowheads lately, but the Reel can be viewed using the button below, or by following me @authorallysonkennedy on Instagram.

Talk to Me, Arrowheads!

If you’re a writer, how long does it normally take you to finish a writing project? Mine vary like crazy.

If you’re a reader, On the Flip Side has a page up on Goodreads! Add it to your TBR here.

Aim high, stay strong, and always hit your mark.

-Allyson 😀