Thursday, September 10, 2009

DONE!

The first draft of Shadows and Dust is complete, at 88,554 words! It's a little shorter than I originally intended, and the plot bears little resemblance to what I envisioned at first, but I think the changes make it a hundred times better.

There's a absolute ton of editing that I'll need to do, however. The ending is pure deus ex machina, even though I planned for it for quite some time, and there's plenty of characters that I need to introduce earlier. Several scenes (at least) will suffer bloody deaths. There's tons of crappy writing, but that's okay, because it's a first draft.

It's done!

2 comments:

  1. Congrats, out of curiosity, how long ago did you start the novel?

    I've been writing on an extremely part-time basis (for about two years) on what was a short story that has become a novel-in-the-making. It was "done" with the first draft at about 38k, though in need of course of much to finish it out and will probably make it eventually to a good novel length of 80k I guess. We'll see...

    The NaNoWriMo very much intrigues me, but I fear I wouldn't have the time to devote to it to make it worth my while. Best of luck on this years competition.

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  2. I started work on Shadows and Dust in May, so it took me about 4 months, all told.

    Good luck on revising the novel. The results of my first Nano, Jack O'Lantern, was just at 50k, and it's taken me nearly a year to come up with some good ideas on how to flesh it out.

    I was skeptical about NaNoWriMo at first, but after doing it once, I'm hooked. It really taught me how to not worry about writing perfect prose intially and just get the story down.

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