New Novel Progress: Heading into the New Year

It's been awhile since I updated this blog. It's not for lack of writing, though. I even managed to update my other blogs periodically. Primarily I hadn't updated here because I was working on the first draft.

My previous goal was to finish before December so I could have a quick editing pass completed before New Year's. That goal was missed by  a month. I managed to actually "complete" the first draft within hours of midnight on December 31st, so I managed to complete my first draft of  a novel in the twilight of the year 2009.

What did I end up with? A manuscript with (according to OpenOffice) a word count of 112,240 words, which isn't bad when you consider that fantasy/science fiction is supposed to be approximately 100,000 words.

The story needs a lot of work. There are plenty of places to tweak and bend, and I said I "completed" the draft because I'm not entirely sure I like the ending; it may need heavy rewriting before it's something I like personally. After I have a quick and dirty chop session I plan on having a beta reader with far more of a clue about grammar read through it and give a brutal set of suggestions of what to alter and rewrite.

I've worked hard on it, but I also work to not become so attached to my baby that I'm unwilling to chop out what needs to be chopped out to make a story that other people would enjoy. I wrote a story that I enjoyed, and even then I enjoyed it as I went along writing it. I haven't re-read it to see if I can enjoy it without having to work on it along the way yet (and no doubt spend much of that cringing while wondering what I was thinking when I wrote XYZ).

It's a first attempt. It's rough. It may not be something usable, but if there's a nugget of usable story then I'd like to salvage it. My wife pointed out that in saying things like this it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments; I'm actually trying to work against that. I have read many many accounts of people who are afraid to give criticism because authors aren't looking for creative criticism as much as they are praise.

I don't want artificial praise. If you like it, let me know, that's fine. But I want the rough parts to be sanded away, and parts that need fixing to be fixed. I can't try to sell this without having something that someone besides me enjoys, and glaring mistakes or issues should be smoothed out before that. I need my beta readers to know that I want honest feedback. There may be things I disagree with but for the most part I want to know about what others think does and doesn't work in the story.

But this is going off topic. The point is that as things go, I have a skeleton of a story, and I managed to complete it just shy of 2010. Now I want to spend the next couple months with editing and polishing a bit. Then comes the fun part...collecting rejection slips!

On the other hand while shopping for additions to the rejection slip pile maybe I'll start a new story...but that's getting ahead of myself. With luck, maybe I'll have an update soon on the status of my editing work.