I'm Backkkkk

(This will make much more sense if you start HERE)

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Well, here we are. One hundred and fifty four days since I first put pen to paper on this, draft number one is complete! (Or one hundred and eighteen days if you count from when I wrote anything past the first chapter…also not counting weekends–I made sure to never set concrete goals for the weekends; have to keep some semblance of sanity, right?) What started as a challenge entry has grown into something much, much more.

However you want to slice it, it was the most productive few months of my writing career: A second place, a runner up, and a nice crispy 170 page draft.

Don’t you dare play that Get Off The Stage music–this is my g’damn moment…Let me bask in this before I get to the hard parts…

But all of that leaves a very, very important question hanging in the air...

Well first and foremost, this needs to go on the shelf for a bit. At the end of the month, I’m off on a nice, much needed, vacation (Dear France, please let us in).

Then I’m going to put this crispy draft on the shelf for a few weeks to live, laugh, knock off some challenge entries, and generally berate Paul.

You know, classic mental health stuff.

After that, well…things get weird.

Then comes red pen time. My target word count for this is between 90-100k words. This draft came in at 70k.

“How can it be a first draft if it’s incomplete?” ask John and Jane Vocal.

Well, the story itself is complete. The arcs are complete, but this bad boy is riddled with holes, with good reason.

Normally, I draft in a linear fashion, which I’m sure is a common strategy.

This time, I went full pants on fire with it.

Scene in my head unrelated to where I was in the plot? Oh, you best believe we’re skipping ahead and dropping that bad boy in like a rock in a lake.

Scene needs a new character? He’s/she’s getting written in as if he/she was already fully fleshed out previously. Then they're getting rewritten in their intro. Then their allegiances are going to change.

Need a deeper emotional impact? Guess we have to find somewhere to kill off the bodyguard because this scenes starting at a funeral.

Caught on a scene? Leroy Jenkins! We’re skipping to the next one and leaving our hero’s mouth ajar, waiting until a later date for dialogue.

All that to say, yeah the plot is complete, but it needs some major cleanup. I found this method of jumping around wonderfully helpful for writing velocity. It’s easy to knock out 1000+ words a day when you start with a five minute writing sprint, then add a sentence here, a paragraph there, boom a brainwave of a scene, and next thing you know, we’re off to the races!

What this means though is there are scenes abruptly missing details. There’s repetition. There’s Gordian Knots all over the place that will need to get choppy chopped. Some of the characters need better developed voicing and others likely need to go entirely.

And all of that is OK! It's a first draft. It's primary purpose is existing.

Where I ended up felt like a good spot to stop, redline, evaluate, and identify where that extra meat really needs to get added. There's nothing wrong with pausing and reflecting.

So after a month or so, I’m setting a goal of five pages of redline a day. Once those are done, it’s back to the laptop to hammer through draft two. So on and so forth.

What else will I be creating then while I redline?

Time to engage Sicko Mode.

I really liked my process for this project. It was my solution for my worst writing demons. So I’m going to apply it to a second WIP. This next one I actually had about 40k words in already, and have an idea of what comes next, but I was bogged down in the current morass of the middle.

We’re going to blow right past those parts and get this baby to the finish line too. I’m going to take a longer, more mental friendly view with this draft and set a 3 month timeline to completion, but with a target of 80k words; a very generous target of 440 words a day. This world is more developed, meaning I can already put some more meat on the bone without getting too lost in the sauce.

Also, and maybe more importantly, I have a feeling A War of Skulls and Horses (still haven’t finalized a new title, oops) may end up growing into something well past 100k words. It may even end up getting split in half. There's a couple of plot points that I think need some aggressive expansion.

WIP #2, codename Armageddon, is much more concise in its total scope, and I doubt it’ll grow past the 90k word mark. (Famous last words).

Given the arc, the world, the plot, I think it plays better as a potential debut.

Maybe I’ll drop an excerpt as a little taster…who’s to say?

This means that my goal is to now not have one, but two books completed by the end of the year.

If that wasn't enough, plus posting here, and generally trying to have an enjoyable life, I’m also toying with the idea of compiling a short story collection.

But that’s just another teaser.

…and now play the Get Off The Stage music…

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A/N:

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