draft two complete!
After 9 months of work (7 days per week, averaging about 3 hours per day), I finished draft two today!
Seeing those numbers there prompts me to do a bit of math.
…Wow. 810 hours of work.
Put that in perspective: that’s like working a fulltime 40 hour/week job for five months. Like starting on January first and working until almost June.
Speaking of which: one thing that I had no idea of when I started this project was how much WORK it would take to write a novel. I naively thought that it might an hour to write a page, hence 350 hours to write a book. And, because I was under the spell of bad advice from Robert Heinlein that one should never revise, I thought that the first draft would be about all the work I’d have to do.
Some stats on draft two:
- book 1: 114,911 words = 459 pp
- book 2: 112,324 words = 449 pp
- total: 227,235 words = 908 pp
About The Author
Congratulations!
The concept of never revising is something that I think will be challenging for me if I finally start writing a novel. I’ve always sort of ‘written to completion’. Notes turn into words which turns into final draft, no real intermediary drafts along the way. That’s how I do songs, short stories, poems. But, I can see that falling apart when getting into a much larger project like a novel.
Thanks!
For my next novel, I intend to grow it more and write it from the beginning less.
It was necessary, this time, to write it from the beginning, just to start SOMEWHERE.
As I wrote, I plotted ahead.
…but ideas often morphed as I went and it took a ton of work to revise things and make them consistent.
Next time I’ll start with 100 sentences, then turn that into 100 paragraphs, then turn that into 100 chapters.