Monday 20^th July 2020

It’s done. Well sorta.

I’ve managed to do the new draft in just over 2 weeks. This is with a day job and other distractions. Best of all, I don’t feel I particularly rushed it.

Case in point, if you remember, I wasn’t happy with a scene with a secondary protagonist as I didn’t feel as if it fitted their new character arc, So yesterday was mostly spent, rewriting an entire chapter. What replaced it is funny, and elevates that character more. I even gave them a kick ass fight to make up for leaving them so late in the novel before I introduce them.

As I suspected, the last few chapters needed a very light touch indeed and so I managed to finish the draft.

Well sorta.

I created a new chapter in Scrivener as I went through the novel called ToDo. In this I put all the things that bothered me or I wasn’t sure about it. This could be things like whether I’ve properly set various things up or whether I should use locations important later in the book in some early scenes. There’s other things in there such as whether the voice of the protagonist and their alt-ego should be subtly different.

The idea is that I can get to the end of my draft and then go back and look at those.

Some, I may deem no longer valid as the worry is now unfounded, but some may need a bit of a touch.

At this stage rather than work sequentially I will dip in and out the manuscript. So if I think there are too many circus anecdotes, I’ll search the manuscript for circus and change some.

However, some bits, such as consistent tone and voice might have to wait until such time as I do my final read through. I want that to be fairly quick and high level so I can get a sense of the novel as a whole. That means I want as little to have to “do” at that stage as possible.

There’s also the Discussion Document. Whilst I’ve created that document, turned it into specific actions against specific chapters, working sequentially through the novel so to keep continuity, I do want to revisit it. Have the asks in this document been subtly altered in the process?

We’re now in the final minor fixes. There’s still a lot of things to be done but because I can mostly dip in and out, it’s really a case of finding the specific sentences, making the changes and moving on. Tomorrow I’ll go over my notes and cross the majority of them off.

Then, we’re onto the final read through and sending it off. I’m expecting that to be done by the end of the week.

I’m super-pleased at just how quick this draft has gone. I didn’t set out to break records but it feels like I’ve now got my editing process down. My biggest worry is what do I next?