The End

​To is the last day of November.  I finished my manuscript on Monday and in its rough draft form I finished with 86,366 words.  I wanted to write a novel with 80,000-85,000 words so I’m not far off the mark.  It is anyone’s guess how many words the published novel will have.  At the beginning of the year I wanted to finish the draft by the close of December and now find myself done a full month early.  Who could have anticipated that?
What has the journey been like, you ask.  It was been both a surprise and revealing.  I know myself well enough to give myself a weekly word writing goal – simple math – 85.000 words divided by 52 weeks is 1635 words a week.  I also know myself well enough to know I couldn’t sustain writing every week, so I fudged the weekly goal and made it 1750 a week, to ensure that I would at least get the rough draft done this year.
Just like the first time I gave myself a weekly writing goal I found that I often exceeded my goal.  It’s a matter of rhythm and losing myself in the story.  As is my nature, I recorded every week how many words I wrote, even it was zero.  As it turns out there were eight weeks that I didn’t write a single word.  Looking back on the process, it is a wonder than I finished by the end of November.  There was also a two week period devoted to re-writing the first three chapters which I decided was needed after comments from my editor.  So, rather than a nice smooth pattern of weekly creativity, my path was fraught with starts, stops and repeat.  A mirror of life.
I’ve read a lot on how to edit your own work.  For my last book I dived in with a red pen soon after writing ’The End’ and worked on sentence structure, grammar and spelling.  This time I’m taking a different approach.  First, I’m going to take a break in December and not read a single word of the draft.
Then in January I’m going to print out all 346 pages and read it.  I need to see if the story has my interest and hangs together.  For the second reading I’m going to concentrate of plot and pacing.  The third reading will explore characters, their relationships with each other and their authenticity.  The fourth reading will look at sentence structure, word choice, tense and technical grammar issues.  After that I’ll let someone else have read for their reaction.
The Wisconsin Writer’s Institute is offering full manuscript reviews this year and my teacher Christine De
Smet is offering the service.  I’m going to sign up for a full manuscript review, the first time I’ve used this approach when the person isn’t also my publisher.  For Out of Darkness, Christine Keleny worked as both my editor and publisher.  I don’t know, maybe it’s something about the name Christine.
I hope to launch Dead Reckoning to the world by this time next year – wish me luck.