It finally happened! First draft is done!

It’s been a little while since my last blog post and that’s because I was holding off. I knew something was close, something I’ve been waiting for for over eight years! Something I wasn’t even sure would ever happen!

THE FIRST DRAFT IS DONE!!!

Yes, mark the day down in your diaries! Throw open the windows and sing to world! Run down the street, George-Bailey style, shouting it out to all the world! It’s finally happened! Steve Vimes has finally finished his first draft!

Ok, I know, it’s probably just me that feels like this. For most of you, it’s just one more thing happening in the world and not that big a deal. Unless you’re an aspiring author yourself, and I’m hoping some of you who are reading this are! If so, shout out in the comments down below, but if you’re not the creative type, you won’t know how it feels to reach this point, but for me, it really is something I was stunned to see!

I’ve been on a week’s holiday from work, so I had a lot more spare time. After rotovating the garden for the good lady Rosie and building a trampoline in the garden for the kids , I got a chance to relax this week and spend some time writing. For some reason, this week the words just started to flow out. I had an idea of how I wanted the story to end and everything started to click and I was knocking out hundreds of words at a time. As I was writing them, I came to the sudden realisation that I was actually damn close to finishing it! A few thousand more words and it was done!

So, I settled down on Saturday afternoon and just got on with it. I wrote, edited things slightly as I did it, wrote some more, stopped for some food and suddenly, there I was, about to write the final sentence I’d had in mind for years now. So I wrote them.

And it was done!

One first draft, all complete and ready to go. Coming in at a fairly average size of  62,539 words.

Weirdly, I felt a sudden wave of emotion I wasn’t expecting. I mean, I’ve been working on this on and off for eight and a half years now, so this was a big thing for me. I could actually say I’d managed something to a form of completion. I know it’s only the first draft, but it was still a Big Thing for me and I was a little overwhelmed at the time.

It was then that another emotion hit me.

Panic.

It was only mild, I wasn’t running around the house screaming or anything, but I then thought to myself “now what? I mean, I’ve never been at this point before. What comes next? Where do I go from here! What do I do? Do I get someone to read it? No, not yet, it’s still awful and needs a LOT of work doing to it! There’s bits I want to change, new parts I want to add! How do I do this??

At this point, the immortal words of one of my all-time favourite authors, Douglas Adams, came to me, as it often does.

Don't Panic

Now that’s always good advice!

So, I came up with a Plan. Not just a plan but a Plan. Capital P and everything!

This will be officially called my Second Draft. I’ll re-read the entire thing at my computer, rather than on my Android tablet on the bus to work as I’ve done in the past, and I will take copious amounts of notes, ideas, thoughts, etc as I go along. I’ll copy the original file and make annotations as I go along and then, when I’ve read through, I will have an idea of how I want to proceed and start editing it and adding the new parts I want to do.

This will help me to work out what I like, don’t like, what I want to change, keep, etc etc.

And hopefully, this time, it won’t take so long!

 

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