The Breeze of Dusk with the Scent of Musk

Statistics

It is time to share statistics about the effort it took me to author my debut novel from start to finish. I provide these statistics openly for four purposes: 1) to document my memories while writing this novel, 2) to serve as a baseline or a benchmark for me when authoring new novels in the future, 3) to serve as a baseline or a benchmark for current novelists who want to author new novels and 4) to serve as a baseline or a benchmark for prospective novelists who want to know and anticipate the effort required to write their debut novels.

I first watched the Chinese TV series Novoland: The Castle in the Sky II that inspired me to author this novel in January 2021. I started writing my novel on Friday, January 7, 2022. I finished writing the novel on Wednesday, August 31, 2022. The novel took exactly seven months and 25 days. In other words, the novel took 237 days in total. The total word count of the novel is: 168441. On average, I wrote roughly one chapter per week and 1.3 pages per day. My writing pattern was not consistent and my writing effort was not evenly distributed over the writing period and this is, in part, because writing greatly relies on the mood and the free time available and at times I was not in the good mood to write or I was busy doing personal or professional tasks. Also, sometimes I had no ideas to write for my novel and I was waiting for the ideas to spark in my mind and flow smoothly on my keyboard. There has been days when I wrote nothing and there has been days when I wrote multiple pages. The novel purely consists of 305 pages divided into thirty chapters and each chapter consists of exactly ten pages. Chapter 5 is an exception because it consists of fifteen pages (ten pages of textual content and five pages of images) because it has five pages dedicated to the images of the recipes of the Syrian cuisine. The novel is divided into three units: the Introduction (5 chapters), the Heart (20 chapters) and the Conclusion (5 chapters). I chose the title of my novel (The Breeze of Dusk with the Scent of Musk) on Monday, October 17, 2022.

I completed Part 1 and Part 3 of this book between September 1, 2022 and September 17, 2022. I revised my entire novel twice afterwards (I read the entire book twice). The first revision occurred between September 17, 2022 and October 2, 2022. The second revision occurred between October 3, 2022 and October 29, 2022. In the second revision, I recorded the time it took me to read every chapter of my novel. These times were reported at the beginning of every chapter with the label: "Estimated Reading Time". Chapter 21 took the minimum reading time which 17 minutes while Chapter 1 took the maximum reading time which is 33 minutes. On average, reading a chapter takes around 25.5 minutes. Reading the entire novel (30 chapters) takes 765 minutes or 12 hours and 45 minutes. Note that the native speaker of English might read my novel at a faster pace because I am not a native speaker of English. I put the last touch on this book on Saturday, November 19, 2022.

On Friday, July 5, 2024, I completed a set of modifications on the manuscript.