Not There Yet
I had set a deadline of my birthday, i.e. today, for the completion of the second draft of my science fiction novel. I didn’t make the deadline.
It worked for the first draft, which I also finished with a deadline of my birthday, but the editing is proving a tougher beast to overcome.
Still, I’m not going to worry about it too much. I’m setting a new deadline of the end of February, and I should be able to make that, I think.
The third chapter, essentially the story of how Bruce Lawrenceson gets his hands on the info he uses to blackmail Redmane, has been extremely difficult. Partly due to the length—the first-draft version of that chapter is over forty thousand words long. So I’ve struggled with it a lot, but I think it might be the toughest of all the chapters (except the last one, but that’s a different issue).
I felt confident of hitting the deadline after chapters one and two, but three proved much harder. That’s okay, these things happen, and I have a new deadline.
But: barring extraordinary circumstances, I want this draft done by the end of February. If I don’t get it done by then, I might well abandon the whole thing. It’s been years—the initial snippet that (unknowingly) started the novel was written in 1998, and my effort proper to write the first draft began in late 2002. I absolutely want to finish it, but I also need to get going on the other ideas I have, especially “Coup” and the fantasy novel that’s clamoring to get out of my head and onto the page.
Deadline two, deader than the first: 28 Feb 2007.
29 Jan 2007 at 11:00
Belated happy birthday!
29 Jan 2007 at 11:05
Thanks!
29 Jan 2007 at 11:58
Uh oh, I forgot. Again.