It’s been almost three months since my last writing project update, but after tacking on another 30,000 words and making it to the end of what I had outlined for the story, I finally have what I’m calling a complete draft.

I have to give credit to my heroic printer, which, despite my best efforts to kill it today, managed to spit out a pair of hard copies.  I knew from scrolling around the Word file to tweak a few things in the past week that I had a lot of content, but it seems rather ginormous in this form:

Yes, I weighed it: 2 lbs.

I’m interested to see what I find in the story when I read it as a whole and not just little pieces at a time.  Yesterday I rediscovered that one of my main characters is a smoker — a detail I haven’t included with her since roughly July.  Whoops.  I guess that’s why we have drafts.

I posted on April 1 last year that I was starting writing, and it’s kind of incredible how things have changed since then.  I went on vacation last June with the expectation of writing a lot.  I probably got through 2,000 words in six days.  Lately I’ve been in the habit of going to Starbucks to write a few mornings on my weekend.  I can knock out 1,500 words by the time it takes me to finish a large hot chocolate.

The biggest difference toward the end was feeling like I knew what I was doing.  I’ve spent so much time with these characters — working on how they talk, how they react to certain things and most of all, how they relate to one other — that I don’t have to sit and ponder how scenes would play out.  They just happen.

Hopefully I can apply those productive habits to the editing process.  I have a few readers, in addition to chief adviser AV, diving into the story now for some much needed feedback.  More updates as things progress.