It's Finished!

The first draft of the novella is finished as of tonight. Now the rewrites begin. OY!

The final word count is 47,824 according to Scrivener. Word has it at 47,785 and 237 pages. If I'm wanting this to stay at around 50,000, that does give me some words to play with, which is good because if I  know me, I need to add some descriptives in here. 

I'm just so excited to have it done. One step closer to getting it out into daylight. I'm also excited that the climax went exactly as I envisioned it and that rarely happens for me. Usually, some character or circumstance will just pop right in there without warning and then I'm stuck trying to figure out how to write around it. Not this time. Just went straight through with only a few steps back for dialogue issues. Even my inner editor kept her mouth shut for once. Now that I'm about to start draft #2, she can get to work.

How do I feel? Tired. Very tired. It's very tempting to sit back and just enjoy the accomplishment for a while but I don't dare. I know me. If I do that, I'll never get the 2nd draft done and then all this effort will be for nothing. 

Nope. Not gonna do it. Gonna get a good night's sleep and begin plowing through the edits tomorrow so that the 2nd draft is done by the end of August and into the hands of my draft readers on September 1. 

And I now know what I'll be writing in November. Kind of alluded to it at the end of this one. I'm going to go about the second novella a bit differently, though. I'll be using the full ability of Scrivener to plot out the story before I start writing it. This will be a new way of writing for me but I look forward to a more structured writing experience. Not that I'll refuse an unexpected event like a new character showing up. Those are sometimes happy interferences that actually improve the story. 

Gotta be flexible, right?

Another exciting thing happened tonight. My little writing group met a very nice lady who just had her first book published traditionally. She'd already self publish one then landed a contract with a small publisher. I got it on my Kindle and started reading it tonight. 

She had overheard our conversation and came over and introduced herself then talked to us about her experience. Her advice? Be patient and keep on writing. She really encouraged us and I'm thankful she felt moved to come talk to us. I think it inspired all three of us. I know we didn't spend a lot of time chit-chatting and got right to work. We may even spend some time writing together tomorrow night as well. I'll be editing, of course. 

Exciting day but I'm exhausted now. I feel as if I've run a long marathon and maybe I have. I've done more consistent writing over the last few weeks. Much more than I think I've ever done and I have to say it feels pretty good. 

I think I can say with full confidence that I am finally taking this writing thing seriously.