With all of my excitement over my trip to Oregon and the Badger Mountain 15k, I didn’t post an update on my book progress in March, as I should have.
The good news is…drum roll…I now have a second draft of the first book in the young adult novel series I am writing.
To catch you up, I finished the first draft in November last year, spent the holidays with my family, moved to Washington in January, and set a goal to finish the first round of revisions by April 1. You can read a more thorough recap of my writing progress here.
The first three or four chapters of revisions were brutal. It involved more restructuring, rearranging, and flat out rewriting than I had envisioned. February was a big freelance month for me, so I got a bit bogged down in other projects and was feeling pretty discouraged about my progress with the novel. At one point I decided there was no way I would meet my April 1 goal, it was all hopeless anyway, why am I even bothering to write this book in the first place, I should probably just quit.
But then somewhere around Chapter 7 or 8 of the 14 chapters in the book, I realized that I had finally hit a writing stride in the original writing process. (If you’ll remember, the first version didn’t even have chapters — what was I thinking?! Putting in the chapter divisions was my first task in revising this monster.) The last several chapters were much tighter, better written, needed much less revising. I ended up finishing the second draft at the end of the third week in March, just in time to drive to Seattle and pick up Erin for our Oregon trip. Perfect.
The second draft is also 50 pages longer than the first, which makes me happy. I fleshed out characters and scenes and feel much more satisfied with this version. Still not completely satisfied, but at least I no longer think I should just quit and never type another word.
Next step: one more pass through the entire manuscript on my own, then I’ll send it along to two or three readers with critical eyes to give me their opinions. Hopefully by this summer (June? July? August?) it will be polished and ready to be seen by someone in the publishing world.
