21-Day Challenge: Day 14

OK! I\’m two weeks in. And had a great writing day today, despite work: 4446 words, bringing the total count to 53,133. I expect to finish the book tomorrow, which is WAY ahead of schedule. In the plan I wrote out, the first draft was to be completed by the end of Wednesday. I\’m not finishing because I\’m writing faster than expected, but rather because I have two chapters left to go, and expect the book to wrap up at about 56-57k words, instead of the 70k I\’d initially planned. I\’m OK with that… Remember my mentioning a while back that I was trying to outline with the Story Grid method? Or a somewhat scaled down version of it, anyway? I suspect that my inexperience with that method has left the story a little leaner and therefore shorter than I\’d expected.

Before I go any further, I\’d like to pass along this invitation:

When the work is completed, I will be emailing out a link to the folks who\’ve been following along on my email list. If your address is in there, you\’ll get a copy of the rough work, just finished, with no polish or edits. For you folks who\’ve been following, this will give you something to look at and compare against for changes.

If you\’re interested in taking a peek, it\’s not too late! Click the link below:

[button link=\”http://eepurl.com/bRiL-D\” type=\”big\” color=\”orange\”] Sign Up For the First Draft![/button]

Or you can just wait until it\’s out on Amazon, one week from today.

Editing and Revision

I\’ve written before about how I look at the editing and revision process. The TL;DR version: I don\’t generally revise. I either self-edit (used to do that professionally; not recommended unless you\’re quite good at it), or hire out the work to an editor. On longer works, I tend to do the latter. Mostly because I hate editing. I like writing the thing – correcting typos is not on a list of my favorite things.

In general, my finished published copies are about 98-99% identical to the first draft. I manage this by cleaning up the work as I go. If I notice myself repeating words, I\’ll skip back up and fix it. If I need to add an element to a previous chapter to explain something, I\’ll get to a good stopping point then go back and add it. I do these things while I write, so generally the first draft is very nearly the final one.

This run might be a bit different. In fact, if I add 3000 words to a 57,000 word story, as I think I might, then I\’ll be changing at least 5% just with those additions. That\’s unusual for me – which means it\’s a good thing I\’m going to have Tuesday and Wednesday to do some extra work on the book.

Every writer\’s editing process is a bit different. Ironically, despite Chris and I expressing some of those differences earlier, it\’s looking like the books we\’re writing right now are going to be more similar than I\’d thought! I\’m using something much more similar to his process, adding in extra scenes to the final copy. But I think in this case at least the book will be stronger for it.

Sign up for the draft and you\’ll be able to compare and see for yourself whether you think the changes merited inclusion or not!