Went away after the last post, wrote 898 words, then realised I was done. The net for Draft One is 20,799 word, and there is a part of me that’s still kind of shocked that I’ve written something that long. I don’t do long that often, and I can still remember two years ago when writing the 10k novella for my AHWA Mentorship was a long, drawn-out battle to get words on the page; when I look back and realise that this has all been done in less than a fortnight, it freaks me out.
I can safely say without looking at it that this is one of the most god-awful draft I’ve ever written, full of random asides and irrelevant scenes that aren’t going to make any sense to anyone who isn’t me. Which is okay, really, because I’m slowly starting to figure out that this is going to be the process I end up using for novellas (or, at least, for this particular style of novella) – it’s literally a race to the finish line where I keep writing until I’ve got the shape of the story worked out, some of the key moments nailed down, and an ending that everything is working towards. Tomorrow I’m going to compare what I’ve written to the plan I started with – I suspect there’s not going to be many similarities between the two short of the occasional image.
Draft two will be about going back and adding a bunch of stuff in – I think at least two scenes will be replaced altogether, one character needs to be given a lot more page-time in order to make the ending work, and I suspect one scene will be pulled forward in order to serve as a much stronger end to the act-one part of proceedings than what I’ve got there. I’m also toying with the idea of pulling some chapters apart (since I seem to write novella chapters in binary scenes that play off each other, both hitting a particular narrative beat in the three-act structure) and adding in additional stuff around them.