First draft of book complete - what's next?

Moments before writing this, I finished writing the first, roughest draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea. It packs a good 126488 words and took me only 43 days to finish, which is easily a new record for me!

The previous holder was probably The Vagrant's Wings: its first draft stood at 140743 words and took 62 days. Rather slower, all in all. Here's hoping I can still keep on breaking the record.

So what happens now?

Well, now I'm going to take a break out of this thing. I've hung it to dry for a month, clearing my head and getting involved in other projects and activities. 15th of November next month, I can return to it with an open mind and rewrite the whole damn thing. By new year I'm hoping to have something to throw at my editor, and then barring sudden cataclysms it should be ready for publish sometime 2019.

I rather like how this one turned out, and it's gotten rather good reception in my test group as well. I hope it will find a bit larger audience. It remains to be seen, but I'm optimistic.