wake up!

The novel isn’t done. Well, the month isn’t over until midnight tonight, and I haven’t hit “The End” yet but am aiming to do so sometime today. But I crossed the finish line from the National Novel Writing Month perspective last night when I exceeded 50,000 words written in November. w00t!

It only took my two nanos and just over a year to write the entire first draft of For You, The Stars and I did it without ever looking back or re-reading, so I have no doubt there are continuity problems, crutch words, hemming and hawing, rambling, extaneous scenes, too many characters, pointless digressions, and so on.

I expect I will take a little vacation from this story in December and then in the new year actually read the novel myself for the first time. After that I expect to embark on a revision process. I’ll reorganize the chapters, fix the timeline issues, probably reduce the number of characters and possibly combine some. I may also have to write some new material. Who knows?

If I can get a coherent second draft written, ideally by the early spring of next year, then that’s when I’ll send it around to trusted friends and colleagues for their feedback. If that works, I’ll do a third revision and then the goal would be to send that out to a few agents and editors, possibly sometime next year.

We’ll see. Right now I’m just glad to have the final page in sight.