First Draft – Finito

On 29th March, I announced on Facebook that I was about to crack open a new notebook and start writing the first draft of a new book.
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Before I started

I’d spent ages on the outline and agreed it with my agent. In fact I sent her a seven page synopsis! Any authors out there know that seven pages is a complete no-no when submitting work to agents, but luckily my agent is prepared to put up with my idiosyncrasies. If I give her the usual one pager she sends me loads of queries. The answers are all in my head but they didn’t fit onto one page, so she gets the full monty whether she likes it or not!

I’m afraid I neglected my parental duties, I didn’t do any admin, I didn’t write blog posts or do any chores. In fact I didn’t do anything for anyone else during that time. It’s very hard to be super-productive as a writer as well as doing other stuff.

But today, twenty four days later, I finished the first draft.

My notebook now looks like this :

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The End

I wrote all the way to the end and then turned the book upside down and wrote on the reverse of the pages. There were 160 pages at the beginning. There are 18 half used pages left. The rest have gone to recycling and I have a hundred page typed up document which I am very proud of.

I think it is important to edit off a hard copy, so I sent a pdf to be printed to spare my ailing printer and depleting toner cartridges. It’ll come back with it’s own snazzy spiral binding. 

Next week I will start the second draft and I rashly told my agent I would send it to her before half term. Yikes! That’s four weeks away and in my blog post here, I said the second draft took me months rather than weeks. 

Guess I am going to have to neglect my family and friends all over again. I hope they forgive me.

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