Mission Accomplished

I met my deadline of August 14th for One More Day’s Second Draft! As I continue with my writing I am finding I can put things together much faster than when I first started. I was honestly a little surprised when I didn’t blow past that deadline for myself. I had to work hard to make it, but the deadlines give me something to strive for. Which I have found helps me.

Revision is tough. I am certainly not the first to say that, nor will I be the last. But I don’t feel like I am creating something new while I am revising. It truly feels like work, whereas the drafting process I love dearly. I could do that all day every day. But revision is what can turn a good manuscript into something great and publishable, so it needs to be done.

I am going to step away from this process and begin work on my next novel to get a little space before starting the third draft. I will resume work on August 22nd, with a target completion date of September 22nd. Though I doubt it will take that long. The third draft should progress quite a bit faster.

In addition to that I am still chewing on my query letter. I posted it to /r/pubtips on reddit a while back and got some very helpful advice. I will be revising it and reposting it in the next few days.

One More Day

One More Day’s first draft is complete. I’ve heard it said that your second book can be even harder than your first, and I have found that to be the case. I am a better writer now than I was when I wrote An Aspect of Fear. But I had that idea in my head for years, when I sat down to write it I knew exactly what I was trying to do. But that wasn’t so with One More Day. It was a tale that grew in the telling, and it was a pleasure to watch it do so.

Through this process, I’ve learned I am not a discovery writer, I like my outlines, and I will be putting one together as I firm up the story with my subsequent drafts. It was valuable for me to experiment with this, and I feel like a more rounded writer for having given it a shot. There are tools I will take with me for the rest of my career, and I look forward to how it can make my future projects better.

With that said, it is time to get to work again. The edits I am planning to make for One More Day’s second draft are not earth shattering, but there is plenty of work to be done there. I am aiming to have this done by August 14th. In the meantime I need to start working on a query letter. I’m going to need a lot of revisions to get that right.