With a final burst of enthusiasm, I have finally finished the first draft of my new novel. As always, my conclusion seemed rather short, but what can you do? I don't know what the final word count will be on this as I've yet to paste all of the chapters together, but it will be pretty close to 30,000 words, which was my target.

For the information of anyone who cares, the name of the novel is "Jacob's Abyss". It's aimed at children in the 10-14 age range, although it could overlap into YA or middle-grade. (It might be a little dark for middle grade, though.)

Now I'm going to put it away in a drawer for at least a month. After that, I'll give it the 1.1 revision: tidying up and checking for consistency and so on, but not a proper re-write. After that, I guess I'll get critiques, do a second draft, let it sit for another month or two, then do a final draft.

In all, the first draft has taken a little under 2 1/2 months. I had intended to get it done by the end of February, but what with illness, revising my last novel and putting together a query package for it, and working on short stories, that got put back a little. Still, 2 1/2 months including interruptions, isn't so bad. I'm happy with the whole thing at the moment. (The disillusionment comes at about draft 1.1 - draft 2 stage; by draft 3 I'll be happy with it again.)

I guess I'll now spend a bit of time working on a few short stories, then think about starting a new novel. I have another children's novel in mind, the first 6,000 words of which have been written as a short story. That short story is out waiting to hear at the Usborne Fantasy anthology. If they decide to accept it, I guess I won't be able to publish it as part of a novel for a couple of years. If they don't, I'll probably market it to a few other places before turning it into a novel, because it works really well as a short story. (As a novel I would add another point of view, expand the centre of the story, and continue on from where the short story leaves off (probably changing the current end a bit)). It might be most sensible to let that lie for a while, but if it grabs me, it grabs me.

Other than that, I'm starting to think about revising the first novel I attempted, my adult fantasy, Water Ways, Iron Roads. I had pretty much abandoned it after it was critiqued, because it was a bit of a mess. The children's novels have been far tighter and blend character, plot and action much more organically. However, now that I've written two kids' novels, I think I've developed more novel-writing and plotting skills, and I might be able to make a decent attempt at the adult novel. I like the ideas in it, but it needs gutting in places. I need to shift a lot of plot revelation to much earlier in the book. I need to motivate the characters properly. I need to change some point of views and add others (I didn't realise until the end that all the point of view characters survived and none of the other major characters did).

That would probably take 6-12 months, as it was 150,000 words in first draft and might be more in second draft.

I do also need to get some more short stories written and out there.

#

It's also the end of the week. Steph and I watched the first couple of episodes of Buffy season 1 last night. Some observations:

1. Buffy was a hell of a lot younger back then!
2. The episodes were far more scary.
3. Giles's British accent was way over the top.
4. The acting and writing wasn't anywhere near as smooth as in later series.
5. These episodes had far more in common with the movie than with later series: the attitude of the kids really fitted with the airhead movie depiction.
6. I really like those early episodes.

Anyway, with the weekend upon us, I predict much more Buffying, until we're completely sick of the whole thing.