Draft done!

I wrote this!

At just over 80,000 words, my novel draft is done.  And almost a full month before the deadline I gave myself and told Rob.  I told him I’d be seeing Star Wars, and I was so certain, I bought the tickets when they went on sale.  I did expect to finish sooner–around Halloween–but we went to the zoo, then the weekend after we went to a convention, and this past weekend we went to a corn maze.

As much as I don’t like the idea of not doing something I so very, very, very much want to do, making that my reward/deadline, and telling Rob, does help a lot.  Plus it helped that a lot of what I was working on was mostly rewriting scenes.  The framework was already there, I just had to add to it.

But now I’m not sure what I should do.  The smart thing would be to move on to something else and let the story sit a bit before diving into the next draft/revisions, but I’m still very much attached to the characters and want to make the story better, especially cause I already know a few places that need improvement, even though some are pretty minor.

I could also start on the next story.  I kinda already have, since the first ending got reworked and a large part set aside to begin the second, but I also need to work out an outline/plot since I never got quite that far when I started. Though I’ll need to go through the old files and figure out what’s good enough to keep–if anything–and what to get rid of.  And there are two different drafts, too.

I think it’d probably be easier to just start in on revisions than to work on the next one.

There are lots of short story ideas I could work on, but none of them have really grabbed me yet, which is the main reason I stopped working on them and focused on the novel draft.  There’s also the beginnings of a space opera, though it’s extremely early in planning–I’m trying a different path with this one, and it’s in the worldbuilding phase.

So, since I’m not sure what I want to work on, I printed almost everything I might want–printer kept acting up, and it’s running out of ink.  I really should get a laser printer that does duplex.