I finally finished the second draft of my novel. It only took a month or three longer than I expected. Final wordcount sits at roughly 132k, 682 manuscript pages. There are a billion different conversion rates for figuring out how big a book that makes, but I’m just not going to bother figuring it out. Besides, in the world of e-readers, page count is pretty pointless.
I’m mostly happy with my second draft. I’m wondering if it’ll be possible to be completely happy with any draft, and from what I’ve read of other authors’ blogs and advice… probably not. But, I’ll take “mostly happy” for now, until I get feedback from beta readers and that turns into “suicidally depressed”. I send the manuscript off to a friend who offered to do a proofread pass on it for free – an offer I absolutely won’t pass up – in the next couple of days, and will likely have it in readers’ hands in a couple of weeks. And then I wait. And brood.
And begin outlining the sequel. As I’m sure is a huge mistake, this is the first of a planned 4-5 novel series, and I really want to get on with the second book as soon as possible. I’ve got ideas for how it will start and end, and now I just need to flesh out the middle, just like this one. I’m hoping that the second won’t take nearly as long as the first. Actually, I’m going to do my damndest to set and stick to a schedule with deadlines, and crank out book two as fast as I can.
Anyway, it’s done. It’s as done as I can get it before putting it into someone’s hands to read. I could, conceivably, spend another year revising and refining. While I may not be interested in pumping out two novels per year, I also don’t want to be George RR Martin and endlessly pore over a manuscript until it drives me insane. Let’s see what people think.
