Finish the Draft Day

Today is finish the draft day. I had a school visit on Tuesday morning, and although it didn’t cut into my actual work time, those things are a massive energy drain, so I got a lot less done that day, and I spent much of that time on research and plotting. I’d been going back and forth between ideas for how to get my characters out of the fix they were in, and at about 4 a.m. on Tuesday I woke up with an idea. Normally, those 4 a.m. “brilliant” ideas that solve everything in the book end up being utterly ridiculous when I wake up and think about them, but this one still made sense and was somewhat viable once I did some research. I needed a better mental image of the location in that time period, and fortunately there are some libraries and museums who have put their historical map collections online. So, that was Tuesday’s work, backtracking to get that set up.

I finally managed to move forward and get my characters out of their immediate jam yesterday, but then I had to get ready for children’s choir. I had something I learned from the workshop a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to try, but it took some preparation.

Today, though, I have no reason to leave the house, nothing on my calendar or to-do list other than writing, and I’m very close to the end of the story. That will leave me a few days for revision/editing and a couple of days for proofreading. I don’t have a lot of rewriting to do, since I’ve been doing it all along. The only thing I know I need to fix is adding a character to an earlier scene to set up his existence. Otherwise, it’s fixing words, adding description and emotion, etc. I can do this! And to help, yesterday I found a bag of dark chocolate Dove hearts that I must have bought last year in the Valentine’s candy clearance sale. They’re just past their sell-by date, so I need to use them quickly, right? They’ll make good writing fuel.

The school visit was interesting, even if it was draining. It was my “neighborhood” middle school — it’s actually in the adjacent town, but it’s where my kids would go if I had kids. The kids were really engaged and asked great questions about books and writing. A couple of girls lingered afterward to ask more in-depth questions. It turns out they’re already writing novels and posting fan fiction on Wattpad. Those kids are the reason I like doing these events. I was those girls at that age, though without the Internet to share my work with others, and it would have been a really big deal for me to get to talk to an actual author when I was that age.

Now, off to go turn tea and chocolate into a steampunk fantasy novel.