Yay! (progress of novel)

[mary_j_59]

I still have a long way to go, but I finished the first draft of Honor this morning. It ended up just under 80 thousand words - so just about twice as long as I expected it to be. And I learned an awful lot from the process. More on that later.

Rewriting starts tomorrow; I have to rewrite one chapter pretty extensively and clean up two or three others slightly before I have a really good draft. Then I can start looking for agents.

Comments

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

Yay! Well done :)

I'm probably too late, but if I were you, I'd set it aside for at least a week before starting the rewrites.

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Jon! As to getting a sense of the novel as a whole, I'm sure you're right. But - I wrote it piecemeal, using Scrivener (the best novel-writing software ever!), and I knew some time ago that this particular chapter would have to be rewritten, based on what I'd learned about the characters and their situation.

I just rewrote it today - it may need a bit more refining, but I will wait a while to do that. There are just one or two more additions I'll want to make to a couple of other chapters - and then, I promise, I will stop tinkering, send it out to my beta readers, and try to see what I've got. I'll definitely leave it alone while waiting for feedback.

But, in the meantime - I can hardly believe I got this far! :)