Editing

So my NaNoWriMo from 2009 is the novel I feel like has the best of me in it. The characters are dynamic and full of confusing emotions (for them), and want to fight and love and be. The plot also forces them to make tough decisions and the conflict comes from their own lives. Currently it is called EoW (not really, an acronym of the title) but I think I'm going to try and come up with some better title, because if this book were to lead to sequels, the series would take on that name. I'm working on it.

Anyways. I wrote this NaNo with an outline, which was ditched at about chapter 5, or half way through, which makes the first couple of chapters quite good in terms of having scenes that make sense and have action in them, but makes the last few and the middle a mess of false starts and stories that could be told but were left by the wayside. I knew when I was going to start editing I was going to need to fill in the gaping hole that was the middle because something happened with one of the main characters that was not good (in the sense that it didn't make sense) and I needed a few more scenes with the other two to explain what was going on in the middle. Indeed I thought I was going to have to write a huge portion of the middle over again. Turns out, yes I do have to rewrite the middle, and add in what happens with the character who's story got derailed, I have quite a lot of the middle.

In fact, I only have to write 21 more scenes to get to a complete first draft (I currently have a rough draft, which is the mess that doesn't have a solid plot, and has missing scenes as a result). Average word count of a scene for me is 1306 words (yes I have a spreadsheet with word counts of all my scenes, this reorganization happened in excel because I'm just that cool... and wanted to be able to do stats on my novel :P). That means, I'm about 27,000 words away from a first draft. 27,000 words is easy. I mean, if I can write 10,000 in a day, then its about 3 days. So new goal, finish the first draft this week.

I don't know if it will work but I hope it will. I've decided that I won't show anyone this novel until I'm at the second draft stage. First draft is where the kinks in terms of major overarching story are fixed. Second draft is where the fine tuning begins -- changing out parts of scenes that don't work, fiddling with the bits that almost, but don't quite work, cutting scenes that I thought were necessary that aren't.

So, second draft by June is my goal. So that I can utilize the NaNo offer and get it "printed" in book form to send to people for comments and so on for free.

I'm excited.