Finished

I just finished the first draft of my YA fantasy novel. It took me almost exactly three weeks to write, and this draft came in within a few hundred words of the 60,000 mark, three pages shy of the 200 page mark, so there's no doubt it's an actual novel-length work, which I feel damn good about completing in three weeks. I've never done anything like this so fast, so that feels really good.

As far as the actual draft goes, I don't have a clear idea yet how good it is or will eventually be. I haven't gone back and read over it at all. I barely glanced back at previous chapters to make sure I had details right. Partly I had less need to do this since I was going so fast and kept a lot of it in my head as I went. But also, I kept notes on character names and traits so I could reference that quickly as I went instead of looking back and trying to find them in the earlier chapters. Also, I kept making notes as I went on things that need to be addressed in the rewrite, plot points that come out late in the book that should be set up earlier, character traits that need more emphasis, places where the foreign world can be explored in more detail, etc.

On a whole I suspect this draft is not especially good. There are many places where I simply inserted place filler stuff that I knew was a bit cliche or not too interesting or whatever simply because I couldn't immediately come up with something better. Or there were places where I finally understood a character in the last chapters and knew I had to establish that character better in the early chapters. But those things are inevitable with rough drafts. What I feel good about is that the basic skeleton of the story is in place. The major events, the plot turns, the characters: they all have now been established. So my job when I go back to it to rewrite is to make all of those things as good as can be, to strengthen elements that are currently underdeveloped or weak or don't quite work, but the story as a whole now exists as it didn't three weeks ago, so I now have a base point from which to make adjustments. Although I consider the rough draft to be only the starting point of an overall piece--maybe a quarter
of the total amount of work being completed at that point, maybe less--it still feels good to have that accomplished.


The next step is to not look at it at all for a while. This should be easy enough for me at the moment. I'm moving, so this week I have to keep getting boxes of books shipped to my new home and preparations made for my trip. Then next week I'll be on the road driving thousands of miles cross country. Then once I get there, I have the tasks of unpacking and settling in, getting to know my new community, and biggest of all, finding a job. I won't be in a state of mind where I can sit down and look over my novel and begin evaluating how to proceed with revision for at least a few weeks, which is great. And since I've got so much going on between now and then, I won't be thinking about it too much hopefully, so when I return to it, I should have as fresh eyes as is possible considering I'm the one who made it all up.

The other news I have at the moment is that I got a rejection yesterday in the mail. It was for a story that I consider to be my best, but has yet to be accepted anywhere despite making the journal rounds for a couple years. Now getting rejected is not at all unusual for me, and I basically take it in stride now and don't have hurt feelings or whatever, but I do feel encouraged when somebody at the journal has taken the time to jot down a few words on the form rejection slip. The incidence of this happening has gone up for me in the past year, and at the moment I have two pieces making the rounds, both of which are regularly coming back to me with hand written notes. It feels good every time, but yesterday felt especially encouraging because the rejection with a note came from one of the major journals, Zoetrope: All-Story. Of course they still didn't want to publish my story, but for them (who in my mind rank right up there with The Paris Review and The New Yorker) to go to the trouble of jotting down a little PS telling me to keep them in mind for the future when I'm submitting, well that feels pretty good. Whereas a few years ago I sent out stuff that got rejected and saw nothing but form letters, now it seems as often as not I get some kind of personal response. So although I still have a ways to go to actually break in and achieve any success, it feels like the goal is much closer than it ever has been.