The first draft is done.
It came in at just under 130,000 words across eighteen chapters. I finished the last page at two in the morning on a Tuesday, read it back once, and then closed the laptop and didn’t open it again for a week.
Writing the draft took about nine months from first scene to final chapter. The research took considerably longer — years, really, if you count the decade I spent reading around the idea before I committed to writing it. The history of the Gupta period, Adi Shankara’s philosophical project, the metallurgy of the iron pillar of Delhi, the mathematics embedded in the Sulba Sutras — all of it went in, and most of it you won’t see directly on the page. That’s how research works in historical fiction. Nine-tenths of it disappears underwater.
Now: revision. The first draft is a proof of concept. The second draft is where the book actually becomes what it needs to be.
More soon.