An eight o'clock start is always a good sign. Forty-Five minutes and three hundred and seventy-three words later I had finished the first draft of the new book.
I stood up from my desk with the same joyous abandonment as finishing the last paper of my Finals. At that time I took two weeks off to laze around and read. (Why would I do that when I'd been reading five books a week for three years?)
What shall I do now? Well, I won't start my revisions immediately. I shall leave it for a week or two and potter about with a new idea. Maybe start a third book.
As for the first draft being finished, I simply reached the point where I could safely leave it. For now it will do, like an electrician making the wiring safe for the weekend, but needing to come back to do a permanent job on the Monday.
So it weighed in at 53,626 words. Numbers are important. I want the MS to be 48,000. In revising I reckon to lose 25%-30% of the words simply by writing better sentences, which would leave me about 8,000 words short of my target. This difference will be made up by the writing of new scenes and the deletion or revision and development of others.
It may take another two or three drafts - three months' work. But I shall get there in the end.
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