Celebrate the Little Victories

There’s a writing-based group I track where folks are encouraged to post celebratory screenshots when they finish a draft. It’s a nice little ritual, and so I’m borrowing it to celebrate a moment here:

Yesterday, after twenty days and thirty-six thousand words of drafting, I typed <<the end>> on the first draft of a new novella. For those who have been following along, this means it took about four days and six thousand words to flesh out the skeleton draft and get this into a state where every scene actually reads like a scene.

It’s not done yet–the books is rough as hell, and names changed halfway through when it inherited a title I’d been planning to use for another story featuring this character. More importantly, the story may be finished to the point of coherence, but that isn’t the same thing as being good.

The next step: let it lie fallow for a week or so. Nail down some of the packaging elements, such as the blurb and the cover, so I’ve got the story I’m promising readers in my head before I go back for a redraft. Make a list of major character changes based things that came up in the last 10% of the drafting process. Double check that I’ve hit all the genre expectations, and create a research list for story elements that will need to be given a little more realism than a quick wikipedia search will reveal.

Then I bust out my copy of Charlotte Nash’s How To Edit A Novel and start putting together a plan that will get this done by the release date I’ve earmarked.

Meanwhile, I start writing something else entirely. Move away from the Sci Fi and indulge my urban fantasy side for a while.