AKA, the part where my loosey-goosey drafting style comes around to bite me in the ass.
I’m 73k words into draft 2 of this book, and things have been going pretty smoothly so far–when I’ve had time to write, at least, since there have been more days when I would have liked lately when that was not the case. Alas, at this point what had been a reasonably tight draft 1 has turned into a gap-laden string of scene fragments, self-directed monologues, and notes — and those aren’t even in order.
The result is that I am sitting at my kitchen table on a damp Saturday afternoon with the mixer running (I’m making bread), staring at a blank line of my document with no idea how to fill it. Maybe, I find myself thinking, I should go fix Fairy Hills now. That would be a good, productive thing to do. Or maybe I should read one of the [redacted] books I bought in the past week. Or work on my career plan. Or….
Except that would leave me with 73k words of draft that still won’t have an ending, putting me in the exact same place when I come back around to this book someday, which would be a really shitty thing to do to Future Me. So I am going to slog through the rest of this, however long it takes, before I turn my attention to any other projects.
Next time we write a first draft, though, Future Me, maybe write an ending to the damn thing?
R Jean Stevenson 