by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
At day 31 of my final push to finish the second draft of this novel, I’m feeling pretty good. It’s at least possible that I may even have some slack in my projected chronology to the point that I can go through the entire draft a few times before I hand it over to other people to stress test.
So, in a sense, my ability to control the process is going to be reduced because I need other people to cooperate. And given that I have no friends and no one likes me, my ability to get someone to not only agree to read the novel, but to finish it and give me good input is probably pretty limited.
They say, of course, that if you want people to beta read for you, YOU have to be a beta reader. I’m totally prepared to do that, of course, but I probably need to get back into the habit of reading just in general so I can transition into reading other people’s second drafts a lot easier.
As it stands, I really struggle reading anything that I haven’t written.
At the moment, I have a series of scene summaries written out that I SHOULD be able to simply go through one by one and find myself at the mid-point. Once I’m at the mid-point I hope — HOPE — things will go even faster. I probably am going to do a once over on the “Fun & Games” part of the novel before I push forward into the second half of the novel.
But, in general, I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. I feel like I’ve finally gotten my writing to something akin to professional. I feel that once I edit the second draft a few times, that by the time I hand the beta draft over to readers that they will be reading a novel that is equal to something they might find in the bookstore.
That, at least, that’s the goal.
If nothing else, the story I’ve come up with is really interesting and I could see if people really like it that I will have a base of support for the next novel in the series. But a lot — A LOT — could go wrong that will if not squash all my hard work, at least dramatically change the context in which it’s done.
But, anyway. As I keep saying, you have to work on what you do know, not on what you don’t know.
