Today was my deadline for completing the first draft of the woods novel. So – did I beat the clock?
Yes I did. I am really happy!
Unfortunately there’s still lots of work to be done even if I don’t have to face it straight away…
There are some issues I am aware of with this first draft. Firstly, the closer to the end I got, the more dialogue came in to speed me up! When I revisit it in February, I’ll have a fair bit to do getting that fixed – but as it started in NaNoWriMo and I’ve done nothing in the way of revisions anyway, this whole first draft is a bit uneven. It’ll probably need some remedial planning work to flesh out some of the ideas.
I’m also – probably – trying to stretch the story too much at the end. It feels a little scrappy, as though it should have finished, and then I got another idea and just tagged it on the end, so that needs some attention.
I think once the revisions and editing get going, I’ll make the last chapter shorter, or change the order of things in the last chapter. The second option would probably work best – there’s only one reason to do it as I have, and that’s to reintroduce a character; I could do that a different way.
Still, I got through it – whatever its limitations! Final total word count of draft one (which will probably be about 10-15,000 words shorter than a final version) =74,128. Shorter than expected, but long enough to cover all the ideas I wanted to cover. This works for my expectations of 85,000 words in the final version, which is about right for my target audience.
So I’m having the rest of this evening off to watch something rubbish on TV for a bit, and from tomorrow I have until the end of January to complete the new scenes for the family tree book, to get it back for a second round of proofreading at the end of the month.
Wow – I did it! Neo-NaNo is working 😉
Happy writing,
EJ
🙂
Becoming a writer 
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