The Final Six

At long last, and after much rewriting I am finally down to the final six chapters and 35,502 words of my current work-in-progress. It’s been a long time coming, and thought I technically still have quite a bit of work to do before my September 20th deadline, I’m excited for the road ahead and I’m confident that I’ll be able to finish in time.

So what’s next in this process? I think, in spite of myself I’d like to give myself a little break. If and when I hit my 20th deadline it’ll be on a Saturday, the Saturday before my birthday in fact, so I’d like to take my birthday week and really just give myself a little break from my work-in-progress which isn’t something I commonly want.

I realize that between your ‘first draft’ and the editing phase one is supposed to take several weeks to several months, but I’m not sure I want to take that long in between this second draft and my next editing phase so instead I’m going to just take the week, then start the long and arduous process of editing. I haven’t fully committed myself to what form of editing I’m going to do, whether I’m going to read through the book to get a feel for the plot as a whole or I’m just going to dive right in, but I do know that I’m excited to enter the next phase of the writing process and my official third draft.

I hope to have the third draft completed before November/December, leaving me January to put the final touches on the novel. My goal is to start sending query letters out to agents in roughly February which means I’ll need to start working on my query letters soon. It’s admittedly been quite awhile since I’ve sent out a query letter, but if the cover letters I’ve created for job applications are any indication I hopefully have not forgotten this all important skill.