Book progress-Rough Draft Complete.

As of 1:30am this morning, the rough draft for the new children’s/Young Adult (It has probably graduated to solely Young Adult) novel I am writing, has been completed.  Since Wednesday, the story took on a life of its own and decided that it had to be put to paper now.  Just to support that fact, at the end of writing on Wednesday, my word count was 30571.  At completion of the rough draft, my word count ended up at 49335.  With some quick math that ends up just shy of 19000 words on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.   An average of 6254 words a day.  A more normal day of writing for me is anywhere from 1500-3000 words.  Interesting, is all I can say.  I guess I was just in the writing zone.  You don’t enter it all the time, but when you do, you just go nuts and you have to ride it out.  You can’t stop and say, Ok, I’ve met my quota for today.  It doesn’t work that way.   My target was 50000, so hopefully when going through the first re-write, I’ll find the additional words while strengthening certain plot points.  The first edit is always the most fun.  (Probably not really, but…)  You, for the first time, sit down and read what you’ve put down on paper.  When you’re writing, at least when I’m writing, I’m typing furiously getting the story down.  On the re-read, you find where you just plain forgot to put a word in a sentence or find that you’ve doubled up a word or used the wrong word or find that you’ve used too similar of a word too many times in the preceding paragraph.  How many times did I just use the word, word?  Get the point?

So, the refining process begins.  I’ll sharpen up the first three chapters, then submit it and see if I get any bites.  This is the process that sucks for so many authors.  Finding that one agent/publisher, who is interested in the morsel that you are offering.  Now, I remember why I hate fishing.  J

My daughter is my 12 year old test reader and she finished the rough draft this afternoon and she loved it.  I’m waiting for my adult test readers to complete their read through by this afternoon.  Feedback from them has been extremely positive to this point, which is exciting as this is just the very first draft, errors and all. 

Now, on to the critics.