I Wrote A Book...Again

I finished writing my rough draft of Feral eight days ago. You'd think it would have been a bigger deal. I mean, I wrote a book. But finishing the book came and went in my life with little remark.

I think there were two main reasons for this. 1.) I was busy. O and I are at work 50 hours per week, we had scheduled our mandatory summer overtime, we had a baptism class, and we became Godparents. 2.) Even more likely why I didn't get super worked up about it, I knew in my gut I wasn't done.

I thought I knew myself as a writer. I write long and make lots of cuts during revisions. This was the case with the last novel I wrote, this has been the case with most short stories I've written. I thought it was just a given.

I was wrong.

When I finished the zero draft of Feral, it clocked in at 65,000 words. Don't get me wrong, I realize this is long enough to be a full YA for some writers, and not every story is the same. I was just a bit flabbergasted that I'd written something so short. So when I didn't jump and dance and celebrate at my zero draft being done, I thought it was just because I'd done this before, and I knew I had lots of revising and editing to do before it was ready to go out into the world.

Well, I've just finished doing my first read through and taking notes on what needs to be fixed. And I have a new theory. I didn't get super excited because in my gut, I knew a had more to write. After my first read-through, I now have a list of 29 scenes that need to be written or re-written. Which sounds very big and scary, but I'm more excited than anything.

29 scenes sounds like a lot. But looking over the list, it varies from an entirely new scene that needs to be written beginning to end from scratch, to a three paragraphs of a scene that have to be slightly re-written because something changed in the plot.

O asked me for an estimate of how long I think it will take to get through the list. Honestly, I'm not really sure. I don't think it will be very long, given how excited I am to get it done. But you never know what kink will pop up. But I do know one thing. It will get done faster if I get to work on it. So, hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work I go.