It didn’t really take very long at all to complete this. Here’s the breakdown:

12 May 2008: Original exercise (brainstorm a story idea, write a back-of-the-book synopsis)

May 2008: Expand 200-word synopsis to a two-page descriptive outline (same day, actually)

July-October 2008: begin writing once or twice a week (about 30K or 60pp)

Nov 2008: approx. 30K done over the month

Jan/Feb 2009: ten writing sessions to finish it

So overall, if one leaves out the day in May where I brainstormed the idea, it took eight months of part-time work on it. If one includes May to give a better overall idea of the development time of the idea/prep time for headspace, ten months. Eight to ten months is a very, very respectable timeline for a part-time novel.

Now, could I do it again? That’s the question. It would depend on the idea and how fully it was worked out in the synops(i/e)s.