You're in your late 30's and worried about time running out ? Psh, youngster 😜 I'm a lot further along with my hundred million heartbeats, and still haven't published my first book (although I'm slowly working towards it).

The two things I'm finding are first, that Hive works with writing to a "sweet spot" of about a 4-6 minute read. I tend to edit down or skip a lot of detail (particularly scene-setting and location descriptions) to get it down to that, but if I add it back in it'll work for a novel and can easily double the word count without adding useless fluff.

Second is that to convert to publishable book format, I need to remove or change some elements (often key parts) that have been kicking around since before IP was a thing. Most of the ideas I came up with for the Allied Imperiae came from exactly the same sources of inspiration as GW used, and about the same time in the same bit of the world. It's just that back then they had the money, time and network to turn it into a multi-million pound empire with expensive lawyers, and I didn't !

The most important thing is.... go for it ! Otherwise you'll be saying the same thing in your late 40's.

!BBH
!PIZZA <--- all good authors need snacks to keep the brain working at optimum pace 😁