The End… of Step 1
Big update here: I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finally finished the rough draft of my book. That’s right, Laz has reached the stage where if it were to be read, beginning to end, the reader might consider it to be a book.
I feel like I didn’t emphasize the “rough” part of rough draft enough. Let me do that now. This thing is rough. It’s messy and I would be mortified if anyone were to read it.
However, having it exist as a completed draft is a huge relief. When it was just floating around in my head, (for four years, mind you) it was never safe. What I mean by that is that the story was too susceptible to change. Change is not a bad thing, but where writing style and plot are concerned, a story has to change all together. Over time, without the security of being written down, the story had a tendency to distort irregularly, which is part of the problem I was trying to describe when I wrote about writing out of order a few weeks ago.
Now though, the story is on paper. I can hold it in my hands! Most importantly, I can begin a proper editing process, rather than arbitrarily changing details around in my head and hoping I can keep things straight when I finally write them down. This is huge.
Before I begin that editing process, I want to say this:
When I began writing this story four years ago, I had no idea what this process was actually going to be like. The experience has been valuable to me for several reasons, and the most prominent among those is that I have learned more than I ever thought I could just by doing something. I’m already a very different writer than the one who began this journey, and that change has been for the better. I’m excited to continue learning as I do what I love.
