Drafting is Fun!

The past few weeks of finishing my rough draft have bee difficult. From time to time I wondered why I was even doing this. I wasn't having fun, I was constantly beating myself up, and it was painful to get 200 words a day. Yet I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and I am so glad I pushed through! Now that I have started on my re-write, inspiration has flourished anew. I'm easily cruising past my daily word goal of 800, having half-hour bouts of writing that are kicking out 1K words. True, a large part of these words are merely adapted from what I had already written. But what I find myself doing mostly is reading over a page or two of my handwritten draft, and then typing at will for my new draft. Sometimes I surprise myself by using the exact same turn of phrase for an upcoming part that I haven't re-read recently, and sometimes I start going one way and wonder how I ever wrote it so differently to start with.

Besides just the writing of the new draft, there is the plotting and restructuring. I have a whole list of the scenes from my first draft, and that snapshot makes it easy to see how much I really needed to do some structural work! Over the six years of the first draft, I seemed to have gone through several phases regarding chapters. I have one chapter that is 13 scenes long and is nearly half the draft, followed by six single-scene chapters! And jumping from city to city because trying to describe travel bored me, which leads to weeks and miles being condensed sloppily into 2 key scenes and 5 pages. I've been having a lot of fun moving things around, adding new scenes here and there, combining others. It's kind of like starting a whole new novel, except a lot easier because most of the hardest work is done!

So writing is on the upswing for me right now. I'm almost telling myself I could be ready to start writing query letters by the end of the year! Then I realize I'm getting way ahead of myself. Oops.

(Right now, going off MWord word count. Once the draft is finished, I'll revise to "manuscript word count," with the 12 point Courier font and 250 "words" per page.)