Third Draft

The third draft is going well.

I had forgotten just how much I had refactored the first POV. I ended up writing a number of completely new scenes. And I ended up throwing out and rewriting most of the words in the existing scenes because a) the structure has changed significantly, b) I’ve focused a bit more on including sensory details, and c) my prose has improved to the point that the existing words were painful to re-read.

(I’m probably wasting a lot of time, compared to an experienced writer who has already written a number of novels. But given how new I still am to this, plus the adages about 1,000,000 words and 10,000 hours, as well as the published authors who have written ten or more novels before publishing one, I feel like I’m gaining the experience and skills I need to be successful.)

I had a soft goal of a scene per day. Between US Thanksgiving, plus allowing myself a few days of mourning after the US election, plus life and some tricky scenes that took more than a day to get right, I managed to finish 24 scenes’ worth of the third draft in the past 30 days. At the current rate, I’ll finish the third draft around the end of February.

Plans for December

I’m five scenes away from finishing the third draft of the first POV. I’m also about five scenes into reading my third-draft-so-far in PDF form, marking it up to catch the most egregious errors.

I plan on finishing those steps for the first POV, and getting most of the second POV’s third draft done. (I actually have more scenes in the second POV than in the first, so I won’t finish it til January.)

Also, I’m thinking more and more about my pen name. If I want to use a pen name to keep my privacy, keeping these blog posts and my social media presence tied to my real name seems poor. Hmmm….

Stats

I had hoped to cut my manuscript words significantly in this draft, but between adding more sensory details and writing new scenes, I pretty much stayed at the ~140k number. This is still not ideal for traditional publishing; recommended max word count for a debut fantasy author is 120k. I’m finding myself more and more open to the idea of self-publishing, though I may take a stab at getting an agent as well. I’ll decide sometime next year, I think.

Manuscript markdown files: 95
Manuscript words: 139200
Total markdown files: 468
Total words: 428376

My outline’s beat count has reduced as I edited existing scenes and drafted new ones (I found redundancies or parts that just didn’t fit).

End of Draft 2.5:  958 beats, 65 arcs, 93 scenes
End of August:    1088 beats, 70 arcs, 99 scenes
End of September: 1804 beats, 70 arcs, 95 scenes
End of October:   2139 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of November:  2080 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes