Hey Check Me Out — I Finished Chapter Four!Posted by dhoffman on January 8th, 2010
I finished Chapter Four (Second Draft) tonight. This is an official Big Deal because the story bits making up Chapters One through Four were the bits that needed the most rewriting from scratch from the First Draft.
So, I’m pleased.
It’s going to need some work, I expect, but these four chapters (about 10,000 words) accomplish much, much more than the corresponding story bits attempting to cross the same ground did in the First Draft.
Tomorrow night, then, I can start in on Chapter Five and see how that goes. I feel like Galen’s voice (he’s the first-person narrator) is much more clearly defined in this draft than the original. I’m getting a better sense of him and Kara and Joe (China’s not in the book yet, not really) than I did this far in the first time around, too.
Plus, this should be about 1/6 to 1/7 of the total book that’s in the can. That’s an official Big Deal too, I suspect.
I’d meant to post something on Tuesday, the fifth of January, as that was the official one year anniversary of my beginning this iteration of Beautiful Handcrafted Animals. I suppose it’s not such a bad thing that the reason I forgot to blog was that I was too busy writing.
Never something to complain about.
It took me something like, what, ten or eleven months to push out the First Draft? Now we’re a good way into the Second. I’m hoping I can keep this level of productivity (and, subjectively, quality) going throughout. The next few chapters are going to go in a different direction than the first four. Have to see how that affects things.
Still, four chapters in the can, about 1/6 of the way home. Every day I feel Painted Ocean drawing closer and closer. Not that I’m neglecting Galen and his friends, no. But this next project is going to be huge. There’s a lot to think about and I find I’m enjoying the experience of that world developing. First I had a little idea. Then that idea turned into another, bigger idea. That grew, and so on and so forth.
We’ll see where it ends up, if it ends up, and how it ends up. Right now, though, I’m just thrilled to have pushed through these beginning chapters, and more thrilled to be happy with what I’ve got. Tomorrow (or, later today, I suppose), we’ll move into the next section of the story and see how that goes.