Last night at approximately 11:33 PM, I finished the third second? fourth? to be honest, I don’t even know anymore. My drafts were a pretty messy affair draft of Apparent with exactly 75,100 words.
And I cried.
There were many reasons for this. One was that I was flipping tired. I get grouchy when I’m not snuggled under my covers by an hour that my sleeping schedule deems satisfactory. The second reason was something I shall never reveal because I have to keep a certain air of “writerly mystery.”
…I mean, I guess that’s is how this is supposed to go anyway.
But thirdly and finally, I cried because I finally felt close like I’d gotten close to what I want the book to be.
Both of my other drafts were… how do I put this delicately? They were a mess. I had SO MANY plot threads, scenes that really didn’t make sense, characters that disappeared halfway through the story. I hadn’t figured out everything about the world (Not OUR world… I am obviously still clueless about that) or the story I was trying to tell.
It is one of my many gripes about being a pantser.
But anyway, this draft… this is the story I want to tell. It’s the first draft that has a real ending. It has taken me this long to puzzle out the ending, and I’ve finally wound up with one that basically has me all:
I know that there’s still plenty of work to do. I want to try adding in one more scene in the first act to heighten tension, and I have plenty of feedback that I want to incorporate. And there’s a chance that some of the things I love won’t work, in which case I have to trust my readers and fall back a step to fix them. After all of that… then, I’ll obviously be agonizing over querying.
I’ve written two trunked novels. Started a third. But finishing this… I feel like a real writer today.
So, I’m off to ride this “I-finished-my-draft” high for a day or two more before diving back in and getting elbows-deep in my MS again.
See, this is just a blog post so I hardly even care that I’m mixing metaphors horribly there.
For now… I’m out like this:
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