That’s right! I finished my first draft of Recovery House (working title) Wednesday. Some authors say to put it away for a month before coming back to it, but I made so many notes for changes and additions as I got toward the end that I feel like I should go ahead and create a (hopefully) quick second draft that has everything before I rest on it. I started the book thinking that the conflicts would probably be a certain way, but then some of them didn’t work out for various reasons, so I had to create new ones in medias res.
Stats!!!
(Which I enjoy beyond reason)
- November: 12,956 words
- December: 13,124 words
- January: 9,990 words
- February: 16,012 words
- March: 13,846 words
- April: 4,396 words
- TOTAL: 70,324 WORDS
Since 80k words is roughly the length to shoot for, typically, having a first draft of 70k words feels really good to me!
I wrote every single morning from November 1 through April 6. That’s 155 days in a row, according to Google. It takes a lot less than that to make a new habit, so the morning writing habit feels solid to me by now. Which is another reason it’s difficult for me to think about setting the book aside for a month. What will happen to my habit? My routine will crumble, and I’ll have to start over! I don’t do well with schedule changes lol.
This is the first time I’ve finished a full draft in Scrivener, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I know I didn’t use half the features, but my favorites were:
- The notecards on a corkboard!
- The options to work on scenes separately or together
- The ability to put scenes side by side as I work
- The folders and notecards and character list and such all on the screen so I can refer to them without searching
- Having the word count for the whole book/just the day available at the top of the screen, but only if I mouse over the chapter heading bar (I don’t think that’s the official name of the bar ? )
There are other things, too, but my main need was to have reminders of what’s going on in the story as I wrote it because, over the course of 155 days, you can forget a lot of stuff (or at least I can), and having outlines, summaries, prompts, and cues all over the place kept me from having to go back and reread, which in turn kept me from getting distracted in earlier portions of the book and wasting time rewriting and editing what may get cut later, anyway.
Organization tools rock!
Beth Wilson | Author 