It seems last week was the random week in which people wanted to know what was up with my novel, but I reached a milestone this morning, so I’ll talk a bit about it.
The milestone is that the whole second draft is done. The second draft wasn’t a major reworking kind of draft, just a “get this out of the notebooks and onto a computer for the real editing” kind of thing. One would think that wouldn’t take a long time, but I let myself get distracted this summer with moving and going to the Redwoods and trying to work on a couple of different projects as a break from this. But once I realized the Amerrica trip wasn’t inspiring stuff that needed to get written down right away, I shifted back to 3DWorlder and did some plugging away at it in between working a pile of hours at work.
So. In its current form the book is 53000 words long. That is too short to be sellable, but that’s okay right now because the third draft is going to rip this apart and completely restructure it and in the end it’ll bear very little resemblance to what it is now. I should be able to make up the 17000 words that get it into the right zone. I mean, the story is all there, but now I’m going to tell it better. I’ll go through everything and decide which character is best suited for telling which section. I’ll flesh out the sense of things in all those places I just have dialogue driving everything forward. I’ll get things more consistent and start scrambling up the structure. By the time it’s done (which will be a long while yet) I’ll have something pretty cool, I think. I’d started some of the third draft stuff already on some of the early bits and those bits are already much better than they were, so Hope! Progress!
