The End; or Finish What You Started

Last Saturday, I completed the first draft of my work in progress, The Daughters of August Winterbourne. It's always a strange feeling for me, finishing a book. For some reason, the endings almost always creep up on me unexpectedly. In this case, I was pretty sure I had another chapter or two to go, and that it would take me another day or two to get there. That's because, while I knew where the story ended, I didn't know for sure where I would stop telling it.

Does that make sense?

I knew, plotwise, what I needed to accomplish. But what I hadn't yet worked out in my mind was a good, satisfying place to stop once I'd gotten those plot points down. I could easily have spent another chapter or two detailing what happens after Our Heroine, Celia Winterbourne, and her party return to England after adventures abroad. There were certainly consequences aplenty to face as a result of their adventures. And yet, that seemed to draw focus away from where I really wanted to leave the story. So in the end, I summarized everything between the return to England and the end of the school year in a short epilogue, and then ended on a bittersweet, wordless exchange between Celia and Nicholas Fletcher.

I knew I'd found the right spot when I typed the last line and got all teary-eyed. Yeah. That's a good spot. It felt right, and it felt final. "The End" would flash on the screen at that point in the movie version. Yup. Done.

Then on Sunday, for the first time since about the second week in November (when it was much shorter), I read the whole thing through from start to finish. I was surprised that the bits that felt slow and draggy when I was writing them didn't seem nearly so slow and draggy upon reading. Yes, there's still some tightening up to do, and a couple of minor subplots I'm planning to yank out on the first major revision pass, but for the most part, the story holds together reasonably well. Overall, I'm pleased with it.

So that's the good news.

The bad news is that the first draft weighs in at roughly 186,000 words; in other words, about 86,000 words longer than it should be if I have any expectation of publishing the story. It looks as though I will need to lose more than one or two minor subplots, and I'm gonna need to do a LOT of tightening up. There are some places where I think I can do this; I go into far more detail than is needed about a lot of things. But just as you shouldn't carve a turkey the instant you pull it from the oven, you should also let a story rest a bit before you go about hacking it into bits. So at this point, while I am giving it a quick once-over before sending it off to my alpha readers* (they're an impatient lot, and really wanted to read it before it was even finished), I'm otherwise not planning on touching or even looking at this story for another month, maybe two.

What am I going to do with myself in the meantime? Trust me, I won't be bored. I have some extensive edits to do on the first volume of my space pirate adventure series. I've also got a Regency romance that needs to be pared down a bit (why does it seem as though everything I write comes out at approximately 200K words?). And I've got the beginnings of a fantasy story that I want to post to my website as I write it, as an experiment. Website, you say? Oh, yeah, that's something else I can work on.

And of course, I'll be posting here every Thursday, sharing my words of wisdom/incoherent blatherings with all of you. Maybe next week we'll even get that "topic of the week" thing going, like we've been planning!



* If you wish to join the ranks of my eager alpha readers, drop me a comment and I will add you to the list.