SF Novel Second Draft Done
.Yes, done
It’s been quite a struggle. that’s not too surprising, given that I’ve been wrestling with this draft for almost five years, the novel for almost six.
And now the second draft is done, and I’m going to leave it alone for a long time.
The truth is taht I’m not that happy with it. I knew that I wouldn’t be that happy with it when I started this latest attempt to get the second draft done. I found the editing extremely hard, and I also just didn’t feel that I knew how to solve a number of deep problems with the novel. I still don’t.
I suspect that people who read it are going to say, “You spent five years on this?” I imagine that after that, they’ll pointedly say, “Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler in three weeks, you know.”
But it’s done. The first draft was unreadable, a colossal mess of almost 200,000 words. This version, while it might be a bad novel, at least passes as something that counts as a novel. So now I have a screenplay I’m proud of, a bad novel, and a number of short stories (some of them good) under my belt.
The next novel (which I intend to start early next year) will be better.
I appear to have lost seventy-four words along the way somewhere, but given the late-night nature of a lot of my posts, that might be an addition problem rather than being actually short in the word count.
Word count: 79926