MK1 Zero Draft Done!
February turned out to be my best writing month since February 2016, exactly five years ago. I wrote 24k words for the month and finished the zero draft of my current WIP. I started writing this novel in October of 2018. By that count, it took me 2 years and 4 months to complete the zero draft. That’s the longest it has ever taken me to write a story (by a lot), but honestly, seeing the length of time written down—it doesn’t look that long. This novel was a beast to write–it felt like much longer than 2 years and 4 months.
I basked in the accomplishment of finishing for several days and then set about figuring out how best to begin the arduous task of editing the beast. I promptly got overwhelmed. The novel is a 150k words with multiple POV’s with epic scale—it’s a lot for me at this stage of my writing career. I can’t keep the whole novel in my head at once. I began to worry that I would forget things, or get stuck in an endless edit loop where I was constantly editing the back-half without remembering the first-half and then switching, and always having a nagging feeling I’m forgetting something and then switching back ad nauseam.
Eventually, I collated all my edit notes into one document, organized that document and printed that out. I have no doubt I’m going to forget stuff and that I probably have many edits ahead of me before I feel like it’s ready to be set aside for a new project, but the saying by G.K. Chesterton “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly,” gave some motivation to get started.
I don’t know how long it edits will take, but I’m hoping by the end of April I can shift to writing the epilogue and some short stories set in that world. But we’ll see!