Well, okay, I finished the draft of my novel.
Is it exciting? Yes. Is it terrifying? Also yes. Does this mean that now I have a Mountain of Work to do, especially since I have been avoiding the earlier parts of the draft that I know are broken? Also yes.
But I finally got to type these words! Which made my word count an unbelievable:
This probably just looks like gobbledygook for folks who are not familiar with word counts. For context, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson is 383,000 words, give or take (1), and The Eye of the World, the first book of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, is around 310,000 words (2). The Two Towers from J.R.R. Tolkien is right around 156,000 words (3). So, while my book isn’t breaking any records and certainly doesn’t hold a candle to the first two examples here, I’m in good company with the second Lord of the Rings book.
What’s next?
I’m about 100 pages into my first re-read of the draft (out of 800). I’m pretty sure I’ll need to rewrite the first four chapters minimum . . . just in light of some decisions I made later on that need to be foreshadowed a little better. The “inciting incident” for this story needs to be a little stronger, as well, which will be easy to fix since I know where the story’s actually going now.
So, here’s my rough to-do list:
- Finish re-read and preliminary notes
- Rewrite #1
- Re-read #2
- Talk to cover designer about goals/characters (HUGE and EXCITING)
- Make list of small bookstores to contact
- Rewrite #2
That will probably take me through the rest of the calendar year. And then it’s planning for publishing and working on the business side of things (while also planning book 2).
Coincidentally, it’s also now November, so we’ll use the excuse of this previously-titled “writing month” to get a lot of this work done. Let’s get started!
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