WEBLOG:
I finished the first draft of my novel last night! Yesterday I was still about 3K+ short of my monthly target of 20K a month, and because we had visitors for a few hours and I also had to teach a class, I was very skeptical I could hit the 20K target before midnight, AS WELL as finish the book (I still had two more chapters to go). But I wrote every free minute I had and I managed to get it done at 11:30 PM, hitting 4,564 words for that day (and 21,550 for the month) . I was ecstatic–for hitting my target, finishing the book, AND I managed to stick the landing for the ending. It turned out exactly as I had planned and hoped (and this is why I always outline).
This is what the daily word-count record looks like for the last three months:
I started the novel in earnest in November of last year, during NANOWRIMO (I was talked into doing NANOWRIMO by my writing group. Normally I would not have participated because I found the rules arbitrary). But I’m so glad I did it because even though I didn’t hit the 50K word-count, it did push me to really brainstorm the outline and start writing the book. If it wasn’t for NANOWRIMO, I probably would have sat on the idea and it’d still be just an idea right now.
Although I started the book in November of 2018, I didn’t work on it with complete discipline until June this year, when I inquired about a good word-count record keeping solution in my writing group. One of them, Mel, has a system she uses with Google Sheet, and that’s when I started recording my daily word-count. And oh boy, it made a huge difference in my productivity. I really felt accountable for whether I was being disciplined, and on days I was too busy to write, I felt guilty and anxious.
When I started recording my daily word-count in June, the book was at 31K words. The finished first draft is currently at 94K words (original projected word count was 80K). That means I wrote 63K words in three months, averaging 21K a month. I suspect I’ll be both cutting from and adding to the 2nd draft, so no telling what the final word count would be.
This is a meaningful milestone for me, because I’ve written a number of books on and off since the late 90’s, but I never finished a single one, because I always ended up abandoning them or putting them on hold while I worked on something else (I once scrapped a work-in-progress novel with 75K words). But as I aged, I knew I couldn’t just keep doing that over and over, and if I wanted to transition into a full-time novelist, I had to be a lot more strict with myself. These past few months has been some of the most productive and disciplined in my creative career.
Next, I’ll be doing a complete read-through of the first draft and taking extensive notes on what needs to be fixed (structure, plot, character development, thematic clarity). Then I’ll do the 2nd draft (not sure how long that would take) using those notes. After that I’ll do a 3rd draft focusing on polishing the prose (also no idea how long that would take). Once that’s done, is when I’ll be sending it out to the beta-readers.
If any of you are interested in beta-reading my book and giving me feedback, just let me know. You don’t have to know anything about writing and storytelling, because I need feedback from both experienced writers as well as average readers. I currently have a decent beta-reader list from those who expressed interest previously, but since life is unpredictable, I wouldn’t mind adding more to the list in case some of them become too busy to beta-read. If you want to know what the book is about, here’s a brief description:
The book is about people who can control dreams, invade dreams, and assassinate people in dreams. There are extra-dimensional entities who target those with the ability and use them as portals to come into our reality (usually in the form of whatever the dreamer is most terrified of. If it’s supernatural, it’ll be able to defy the laws of our physics when in our world). There’s government conspiracy, and the main character is a teenage girl who gets recruited into a clandestine government program. It’s also a coming-of-age story because she’s struggling with her sexuality and having grown up without a father, and she’ll also learn about the complexities of shades of gray when it comes to the boundaries of ethics in secret government programs.
