DONE!!

    On Saturday I finished the first draft of my novel. Currently, it's 51,494 words long. And a mess. But that's what revisions are for, right? This is my third novel and it's taken me the shortest amount of time to draft. I started in mid-August and finished on January 19, so about five months, give or take. I probably would have finished sooner, but I suffered a horrible case of Writers Block (or as I like to call it: If I write it's gonna suck so I'm not gonna). Nu-uh. Can't do that. First drafts are meant to be crappy.

    Anyway, I was planning to start revising on Feb 2 and not do much writing until then, but I've had an idea simmering beneath the surface for some time and now it's dying to get out. I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to write once I start revising, but I'll work on it a little bit at a time.

    I'm plan to celebrate by reading "Through to You" by Emily Hainsworth and "The Raven Boys" by Maggie Stiefvater, but first I must finish "Hopeless" by Colleen Hoover because Holder is deliciously written.

    I've also been picking out the music I'm going to write my next novel to because I have to have music if I intend to focus for any longer than five seconds on anything. Once I've written a scene or chapter to a song, I generally can't use that song again because my mind automatically goes back to whatever scene or chapter I was working on when I listened to it.

    So, now my game plan is to read a few books on plotting and try and figure out how I'm going to go about this.

What about you? How do you celebrate finishing a draft?

A Case of Mistaken Identity

So, I'm a little over 27,000 words into my WIP. For the previous eight months I'd struggled to revise a novel that just wouldn't come together. No matter how many times I took the scenes apart and put them back together, it just wouldn't work. So, I finally took a deep breath, shelved it, and started on my current one.

Previously, I  would outlined my novels to death before I began them, thinking that I had to know every little detail of my characters and their world. I was terrifed to start without some sort of map in case I messed up. To me, it seemed that writing a novel without plotting it first, was kind of like driving from Ohio to Texas without a map. I would probably end up in Texas, but knowing me I'd take a detour through New York, Florida and Mississippi also. Not the best way to go about a road trip.

Then one day it hit me. I don't HAVE to know every single scene that is going to happen. And it turns out, I was right. I no longer freak out about not knowing what is going to happen next. Well, maybe a little sometimes. :) But for the most part, I'm happy with how the writing's going.