After nearly a year of rewriting, the manuscript for Project Kairos Book 1 is officially done. The first installment of Kairos and Zera's epic saga, finished. 198,917 words--just a few hundred more than the word count of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which runs about 620 pages in paperback.

If this feels a little like déjà vu, it is. This is the third complete draft of Book 1, and something like the sixth iteration of a story that was conceived in late 2020. And the déjà vu gets even more déjà vuey. Just like last year when I finished the previous draft, I finished the day before leaving to visit Josh's parents in West Virginia. Another September. Another deadline that I thought I wasn't going to make, but somehow (not because I put in a bunch of extra hours of writing) the work fell into place, arranged itself, and delivered me to the very same point.