I Have Finished My First Draft!

From concept in 2001 to first draft wrap-up tonight, there have been moments of good writing spells, and several not so good.

Up until somewhere this past October, there was still a very long way to go, and many holes and stupid things to fix.

Jill of The Write Way Home announced to blogland that she would be putting a serial online of a new book she was writing. That intrigued me, and I decided to start a new blog featuring one of the books I currently had in the works.

I decided to put "Black, White, and Shades of Gray" out for my blogging friends to read, critique, laugh at, whatever.

The problem with that was that I had less than half of the book actually written. Much of it was concepted, but still in idea form. Once it came time for chapter 7, I had a big project ahead of me. I basically had a hole in the middle of the book that was masquerading as the Grand Canyon.

I dived in and produced chapters 7-11 which for all intents and purposes were brand new. They included some long standing ideas, but for the most part were very new and fresh ideas. I then took an existing chapter 12 and spruced it up.

Starting in November, NaNoWriMo came about, so I put my online book project on hold for that challenge. That died after 3 days due to life and work. That began a dry spell that continued until today.

I finally decided to get back in the game, and I found that the story was right there waiting for me, and I feel that today was a great writing day.

I finished Chapter 13, wrote a whole new chapter for chapter 14, and revised the old chapter 14 to become the final chapter 15.

I imagine that there is more story lurking in my brain that can be added during a series of rewrites. I intend for the final book to be longer than these 15 chapters.

It is a great feeling to reach a level of completion after all of this time. I realize that it is really only a single step up a long stair case, but it is after all, a step up.