Yup! You heard it here first… Novel 4’s first draft is done.
Now, keep in mind that I (and many other authors, apparently) refer to said first draft as the “vomit draft”, in that everything that’s anything ends up on the page. The next task is to try and manipulate what I have written into something more resembling a coherent, intelligent story… which, to be honest, I think I should be fine with.
Downsides include that the novel is a bit shorter in its current form than I am super happy with (50k words), but that is a fixable issue. As I read through it, I’ll see if there are any areas I can work a few more paragraphs into while I am also trimming and cleaning up the story. Still, I suspect it will end up between 50-60k words, which would make it shorter than most of my other novels (which all hover around the 75k word mark), but that’s okay! If that’s how long it takes to tell the story, that’s how long it takes.
But, more exciting for me at least, is that for the next month I’m going to get to work on something else! I finished one short story while I was here on Hoth, I have two more in the planning stages, and I’m going to see what i can do for a layout of Novel 5 (in all honesty, I suspect I will take one of my four or five other unfinished works and see if I can clean-up and finish those… few things I hate as much as unfinished art!). Maybe that “space marshal-cop-police in space” story I started a few years back… hmmm. Well, we’ll see! Exciting!
Last note: first day off, I wrote 500 words. Second day, 1,500. Third day, 2,400. Fourth day, 4,200. Sadly, today I return home and will probably only get about 2,000 done again… but still. It’s crazy to realize how much I could be outputting if I only had the time. Oh well! One day.