Readthrough of Willow Done (or Helllooooo, 2009!)

Well, I’m back! Did you have a good Christmas holiday? I sure did. Lots of rest and relaxation. It was pretty nice.

Oh, by the way. I finished with my readthrough of Willow.

It rocks considering that I didn’t think I’d be done with it until the end of January. Then again, it sucks because I realized I spent more than a year working on it. I started the readthrough back in October 2007, and I officially finished it yesterday, January 5, 2005. That’s a long time to figure out a first draft of my book.

But despite the long time, I am pleased. I took my time to go through each chapter, making notes on how I wanted storylines to go. Sometimes I had to backtrack to previous chapters to see whether things remained consistent. I wrote down a lot of questions that I will need to do research on, and I have a lot of decisions to make, like names and other world-building tasks, that need to be finalized. But the reason for going so slow in my readthrough was that I wanted everything in place, so when I start on my second draft, I can write it straight, knowing what will happen in each scene. It’s basically what Stephen King mentioned in On Writing  (and I really wish I can find that book now–it’s packed up somewhere in our garage; I could really use his advice again. Looks like I’m going to have to go digging this weekend.)

So what does this mean? Well, first of all, I’m giving Willow a little rest while I get some other things out of the way. My plan is to start the second draft work in February, but first of all, I need to know where I stand as far as writing goes. Seeing that it’s a new year, that means new goals, new resolutions. I’ll have that on the Cafe hopefully this week.

But just think–I’m one step closer to actually having Willow finished. Who would’ve thunk it?

Stay tuned. 2009 is going to be one interesting year…

…

…

…

…let’s just hope that it won’t be as interesting as 2008 was. Oy…

Advertisement