Draft two of the book is done! I could not be prouder.
Two drafts in twenty years? you may be asking, with a smidge of side eye. Let me assure you, moving from Draft One to Draft Two has never been linear.
My filing cabinet is littered with universes. The final project for my Physical Preservation class in library school was printing and hand-binding one of my novellas. The Nordhelm universe alone contains four books, all of which have at least one draft. And writing has never been my main gig.
In my student years, writing happened on weekends and summer vacations. Those days were a delight and a happy memory, but are far behind now.
In the baby days, I was a bedtime saboteur par excellence. I napped when they napped, drank coffee like it was going out of style, and found myself wide awake at 11pm with a yawning pit of NEED. Dump in a book or two as offerings to the postpartum goddesses, and you’re golden, right?
(Take a moment here to laugh with me so we don’t cry)
Fast forward to my husband being annoyingly insistent that I wake up early to write. The battle for early mornings was long-fought and hard won. Many, many grim days were spent tinkering with coffee, naps, and bedtimes, and when I woke at 11 in the babies’ beds, it was so tempting to slide open a page, raise the word count just a bit…
Nope. Small human wrangling is the day job. In order to function, I can choose one. Early mornings or late nights, not both.
I love writing as a side gig, but the downside is that milestones are hard won. Playing with my universe took up ten years, turning a novella and a stack of notebooks into a novel took two. Learning to write for other readers, not just myself, was another two, and then somewhere in there six years and drafts of three additional books happened, bringing us up to the present.
My inner critic would like to scoff, say that it’s not like I’m going to publication. This draft isn’t even ready to go to beta readers, being a few…sixty thousand…words over word count.
But we are not listening to you today, Inner Critic! My biggest growth area is not writing, it’s celebrating each little milestone instead of pushing on to the “real” one. Ok, and maybe staying closer to word count. Today, instead of rushing on to edits, let’s pause. Drink a cup of coffee. Eat a pastry. Sit with our accomplishments. Those sixty thousand words can wait until tomorrow.
Allison Ringness 