At midnight I got my draft done. It’s a shame about all those places in the book where I’ve typed <INSERT EPIC BATTLE HERE> but it’s done. So now what? What do you do with a first draft once it’s finished?

I’m going to ignore it for a week.

My internal editor in snarling and snapping at its bindings, trying to get to the many mistakes I know for a fact are in there, but right now I’m far to close to what I’ve written to look at it objectively.

In the mean time I’m going to enter a short story contest, tap out a plan for a zombie story I had an idea for and generally laze about. There might be beer too.

I’m not going to slack off on the blogging though, I have two posts and a review ready to go as soon as I’ve done the necessary edits.

I might even do some actual work, you never know…

By the way, if you’d like to read the first two (edited!) chapters of my book, you can find them right here.

Just.

I set myself the goal of finishing my first, rough draft, by the end f the month and as long as I keep going on my current schedule, the rough draft will be done on the thirty first. Parts of the manuscript are pretty dire, some are outright unreadable but it will be finished, and from that I can chop out a decent first draft.

I’ll go into an explanation of rough draft, first draft and final draft next time.

That leaves the question of what to do next? I’m going to take Stephen King’s advice (in his excellent book “On Writing”) and leave in a drawer for a couple of weeks and do something else.

I got to the end of chapter 5, and I’ve hit my word count (just). Now the bigger mission begins, finish draft one before the end of July. I’ve been mapping out he rest of the novel, so I know more or less where I’m going. I’m not a natural out-liner and new character ideas are making themselves known in the back of my mind so my outline and the finished product may vary wildly.

I just wrote up a guest blog submission for Nathan Branford’s guest blog competition. It’s an extension of my post on getting an accountant and bringing some extra money in. Either way it will be up on the articles page by the end of the week.

Thought for the day: Twitter, amazingly time consuming but strangely fulfilling

I really hope you all enjoy what I’ve written, please feel free to leave your comments here or on the free chapters page.

So here it is. First, finish the first five chapters of The Shadow Library by the end of the month. Where I am that’s another three days. Unlikely at best.

Step two? Finish another 50,000 words and hopefully the novel in the month of July, my own premature nanowrimo. Why not wait until November when nanowrimo is in full swing anyway? Partly because I’d like to do nanowrimo as its own project, and because I’m horrifically impatient (a bad combination with procrastination) and want to get the story in my head onto paper.

In my favor is my high caffeine tolerance, a good story plan and an understanding (if dubious) girlfriend.

I’ll keep you posted.