Writing Journal 3.18.2018: Success!

Oh, people, I report success to you.

I’ve finished the first draft of my newest project, The American Nine. It is done and completed as of last night, and it was such a great feeling of succeeding, after so much planning, thought, and hard work. After 15 months, I have the thing in my hand.

Here are the final stats on my first draft.

Created: Dec. 27, 2016

Finished: March 17, 2018

Target length: 95,000-99,999 words.

Final first draft length: 97,179 words.

Target date of completion: March 30, 2018.

Actual date of completion: See above.

Oh and here are the weekly totals:

2,543+ words written.

Days writing: 4 out of 7.

Days revising: 2 out of 7 for 60 total minutes.

Daily writing goals met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 3 out of 7 days.

Now, what next? These are the new writing plans:

• I am immediately beginning a first revision on The American Nine. I think the first run through will be for two things.
  • Word diet. I’m happy that I hit my word count target, but I want to run through this and make sure I’m not repeating myself or using unnecessary words. I would love it if I could cut at least 5,000 words and have a little more room for some subplots that I thought were interesting but couldn’t get to.
  • Continuity editing. I mentioned in a previous post that I decided to change two of my main locations in the book to fictional worlds. As it turned out, I made those decisions right in the middle of my first draft. So, now I’ll have to go back and make sure my scenes and descriptions match with the new locations.
•  I am going to now devote more concentration on publishing my book The Holy Fool. It’s my opinion that I am going to have this published whether by a traditional publisher or if I just put it on Amazon Direct. There are two reasons for this:
  • I think if I am going to call myself a writer and promote myself as such, it’s past time for me to have some product on the (Real? Virtual?) shelves.
  • It’s getting to the 10th anniversary of the events in the book, which I think would be an excellent promotional tagline and selling point for it.

As for today, I’m going to get some social media stuff taken care of, do a spot of things for work, and then get to revising. As always, feel free to comment or drop in online.