Attacking the Draft

Done! I'm done with the first draft of the steam punk novel and I've begun revisions for the next draft. So far, it has been easy going, at least for the revisions of the first 20 or so pages. I've eliminated about 5 pages, but written about 4 new pages, so I'm close to coming out even as far as page/word count.

Some basic ideas have changed since I've started the book, so some points I thought were going to be key to the plot are no longing needed. I expected a little of this, I suppose it is inevitable that an author fine-tunes their ideas as they go through revisions. I easily could have had to rewrite the whole thing, I guess, and I can't discount that I may end up doing just that.

I'm happy with my writing so far, but I wrote the first chapter so long ago as a short story, I'm having trouble remembering some of the characters. To the end, I started a chart of all the main characters/ship names/ancillary personalities and locations, just to keep them fresh and easy to access. There is a character or two that appear in the first chapter or two that doesn't show up until much later in the book, so I kept putting a placeholder in, so I didn't have to keep looking back. Lazy. Should've been keeping track of these people in the first place, would've saved some time and effort on my part. Write and learn, I suppose.

I've kept a list of scenes and elements that I know I have write into the final story, so I'm really not concerned about cutting too much. There's plenty to write yet and I'm very closet to the 80k mark right now

The only real problem with my first draft was with a main character. I'd intended for certain characters to live through the novel, so I could use them in other works. There came an opportunity at the end of the book for this character to die, even though they were supposed to live. It made sense to the plot and honestly, as I was writing it, I couldn't think of way out of it. Don't get me wrong, it is my story, I can make anything happen, but it just seemed to work well in the first draft. Maybe in revisions there will be a sudden intervention and someone else will intervene. Who knows what'll make sense then?

Reminds me of one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 quotes. When they're making fun of "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", Joel asks Crow what he wants for Christmas and he replies "I want to decide who lives and who dies."

Hey! That's why we all got into writing, right?