Effulgent Corruption: It is finished

At long (very long) last, I am pleased to say Effulgent Corruption is...FINISHED!
YES!
FINALLY!
WEE!

And now, some facts!

Total Words: 353,435
Days spent writing: 200 exactly (crazy)
Average words a day: 1767 (note I don't write Sundays and I didn't take this into account when getting the average)
Words written today: 7.8k
Word count broken into parts:
Part #             Word Count          Viewpoint
Prologue         478                      Thomas Divinious
Part 1             61035                   Drake
Part 2             67920                   Ciara
Part 3             65777                   Rook
Part 4             37312                   Drake
Part 5             66649                   Ciara
Part 6             24385                   Rook 
Part 7             29290                   All Three
Epilogue         500                       Ciara


Most words devoted to them: Ciara
Who I think is the actual star of the book: Ciara
Number of times I stopped because I had to brace myself for what I was about to do: 5 (three of them tonight)
Times I considered quitting: Too many to count
Favorite Part: Either Part 2 or Part 3
Least Favorite Part: Part 5 maybe? I don't hate any of them, but Part 1 needs the most work and Part 5 was by far the hardest to write. 
Favorite character to write: Rook
The Character I Personally Detest the Most: Edmund
My favorite character in the book: Zahed
Amount I want to cut: 90-100k
How I'm going to do that: No idea.
Key points I need to change: I made errors on languages between the nations, introduced a character that went nowhere (going to cut her completely), and made some errors in Grax's dialogue that doesn't fit with the current vision for the story. 
Gods that are actually dead: All six of 'em.
Wait what?: Yes, they are really dead. Hush up and read the story.
Time I considered rewriting the ending to make it less depressing: At least five, and just about every sentence as I was writing it.
Did I actually change it?: No. But it's still possible.
Number of cities (out of Six) the characters visit: 4
Number you actually see the inside of: 3
Ones we missed: Diasaria and Reneta (they'll be in book 2)
Original title for Book 2: The Dead Six
Why I won't do that: Because Larry Corria just released a book called "Dead Six," completely ruining my life. 
Is it longer than Way of Kings or Wise Man's Fear?: Nope (but only by a hair)
Could you add enough to make it that long: You bet. I can think of tons of scenes that didn't make it to the end, either because of time or because I didn't want the book to be longer than it already was.

Wordle! 


That's it, then. The book is finished. Done. At long last, it is complete. 
Is it my best book to date? I don't know, I sure hope so. I certainly think it is, but it's my own crap so I'm going to be biased. I do know it is by far the most complex, but I think I managed to have everything tie together well. Unfortunately, in order to do that the ending had to be depressing, but I tried to ease the pain and the later books won't be as bad. Honestly, this is probably the darkest one.
What did I learn from this, you might ask?
First, I'm not doing this again unless it's pre-sold to a publisher. This is too big and too long and way too much time. The only reason I didn't quit was because I broke it into parts which made it manageable. Had I not done that I would have abandoned it ages ago.
Second, I really enjoy plotting and writing books like this, but my next step is to learn how to keep it shorter. Maybe Effulgent Corruption wouldn't have worked shorter, I honestly don't know. But as it is nobody will ever buy this thing unless I trim it down substantially. I'd like my books to have a depth like this one, but I've got to keep the word count down.
Third, that I can actually write books like this. This is the good part of writing a massive book: I actually pulled it off. My longest book before this was WGMD, which took five months and was 180k. This is almost twice as long (it's only 7k short) and took six and a half months, so technically it was faster. The point is: I plotted a book I honestly didn't think I had the skill to write, or the patience to go through with it. It is now finished. I am taking that as a massive personal accomplishment. This has been the hardest book to write since the first one (Lacrymosa, which took three years of writing and I had been plotting the thing since I was 16) but it's good. If I only wrote easy books like Steelgods there wouldn't be much of a challenge there.
Last, that I write slower without self-imposed deadlines, and I also write epic fantasy a lot slower than YA. Maybe it's the genre, I dunno. I was churning out about 5-6k a day for the last two-three months, but at first I was fluctuating heavily. When I write YA I can usually put out 70-90k a month (which is the whole book), whereas for this it was more like 50k a month. Not awful, but I really want to try and get to a point where I can easily churn out 100k in a month if needed.


What else? I have my first volunteer reader (James, who also just mailed me an NES) lined up. He's going to binge read it saturday (he's also my biggest fan, ha ha) so my goal is to do a very fast spelling/sentence edit before then. After that I'm setting this down and taking a break. I don't know if I can take a break after being in the habit, so if it seems like I'm having issue I'll do a light 1-2k a day on Gears of Anbar (Steelgods 2) to cooldown before Worldcon. Then we'll see what happens from there.


Thanks for all the support, especially writing group for pushing me through this. I couldn't have done it without all of you guys. Now I need you to alpha read this monster. :P


Novel #6 is finished! On to the next!