It seems I have finished the first draft of my memoir. That happened rather fast, and mostly by cheating. Well, sort of cheating. I imported several thousand words from the sixth draft of my novel, and re-edited them into memoir style, which helped. The other thing that helped was redefining the target word count.
I was originally aiming for 80,000 words. Then my lovely mentor, aka evil hatchet woman, used her red machete on the first few chunks - nothing so common as a pen for her, oh no! So I thought OK, better increase the word target to 90,000 to allow for all that deletion. But in later chunks, she's been saying things like 'do more of X here' or 'give us more of Y there', so I decided that would balance out her machete-wielding antics, and went back to my original aim of 80,000 words.
Trouble was, the story finished when I'd only written 76,500 words. I could have gone back and shoe-horned in extra bits of dialogue and description, perhaps a whole new scene or two. But I didn't think there was any point. I know I've got a shedload of work to do on the second draft. Surely I can sort out the word count then.
So I've finished! For now.
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9 comments:
WOW. Congratulations - that's absolutely bloomin' marvellous.
Does it feel good? I know you'll have loads still to do on it, but finishing the first draft is a huge achievement.
Well done you!! That must be a lovely feeling :-)
C x
That's quite an achievement, well done :o)
wow! that is so exciting. And how is that cheating? You wrote it!
*Bounce* *Bounce* *Bounce*!
Well done!
I've just emailed the report on that last chunk and feel sort of happy/sad to have reached the end. It's a huge achievement and I've felt privileged to be part of the journey.
It's lucky you enjoy the editing stage of the process. You have everything you need now and I know that the end result will be very special indeed.
Congratulations on finishing so quickly.
Yay! 70,000 is a decent word count for a book anyway, but I'm sure more will get added as you go along. And anyway it would be insane madness to insert words just to reach some random statistic! You finished telling the story, so you stopped. That's how it should be.
Well done - its a great feeling to finish!!
Thank you - you're all lovely! *mwah*
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