It’s been a looong week and at the beginning I didn’t get much work done’ Monday I had an interview in the afternoon, for a job I didn’t get. Tuesday, my laptop broke down and I spent the afternoon sulking. However Wednesday, I gritted my teeth and settled down to Mr. Lacer’s desktop of many faults (although it does have Windows 7 and a gigantic monitor, I’m not complaining too much) and with the knowledge that my up to date work in progress would be rescued off my beleaguered hard drive on Wednesday night (once Mr. Lacer had brought a bit of kit to do the rescuing with), I settled down with a slightly older version of my work in progress and managed to do some work. Thursday, I managed to reunite both versions of my work in progress and wrote another good chunk and Friday, tra-la-la-da-dah, I finished my first draft! It’s 50,474 words, the first time I’ve ever broken that 50,000 mark, but only just, which is worrying, since don’t they say one of the first things you do when editing is cut about 20% of your work? Or something like that anyway. I don’t know about cutting (other than an excessive use of the word ‘golden’), although I suspect there will be some stuff but I know I also need to add, add some back story, because at the moment, although not in first person, everything happens to my main character, we don’t see anything without her in a scene, so consequently there’s minimal bad guy plotting scenes and although my story is principally about my main character trying to rescue another character who knows what the back story is about and there’s a scene at the end when that character fills in everyone about the back story, as the back story is almost a completely separate story at the moment, those last scenes feel disjointed, so I need to add some back story scenes throughout the story, I’m feeling a bad guys plotting prologue coming on, to sort of make the story more circular, linking the beginning of the story with the end. So, I’m hoping to write about another 10k of back story but not yet, going to rest the story now until after half term (so three weeks) and then the serious work will begin.
But, back story problems aside, it has been a rather lovely feeling as I approached the finishing line of the first draft, Thursday and Friday I was virtually running home after drop off to start writing and Friday, after I’d finished my hour and still had a scene to go, I decided to continue writing, as I was so close to finishing it was tantalising, so I wrote for another 40 minutes prior to pick up, then for another hour with the kids in the room (it’s rare for me to be able to write whilst the kids are in the room, too distracting), till I wrote that final line that I’d thought of months ago.
So, three weeks off writing? I have over the last few weeks, with the knowledge that my first draft was almost at the end, been almost panting in anticipation at the thought of starting another story, with lots of ideas jostling for attention and although I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong starting a new story whilst editing another, in fact I think it’s quite good, in a not putting all your eggs in one basket sort of thing, I could polish my current story all I want but if there’s something fundamentally wrong with it or there’s something commercially wrong with it, it’s not going to sell and therefore it’s always good to have other ideas being worked on, which might work. However, although I declare the first draft officially over, the back story issue is still too much of an issue, so really the next draft is draft 1.5 not 2 and therefore I need to still devote more story telling on it. So, in the mean time I think I might in my writing time, look at writing some smaller pieces, just whilst I’m letting this story rest or considering I’ve been devoting my crafting / writing time purely to writing, I may just put down the keyboard all together for a little while.
