Finishing my First Draft

This is a different kind of post to what I normally post, but it is somewhat book related. Some of you may or may not know that in November of last year I took part in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) which is a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in that one month. It has always been one of my dreams to write (and one day publish) a novel, so I went ahead with the challenge despite never doing anything like it before. I decided to work on an idea that I’d had brewing in my head for a long time. It ended up being a YA novel called Always, about a girl who after being able to see ghosts since she was younger ends up falling in love with one who mysteriously appears on the grounds of her boarding school. I’m a pantser which means that I just usually write what comes to my head instead of planning. However, a little bit of character planning happened before I started writing. 

The writing itself was pretty challenging at times and I remember wanting to give up a few times. I’m very self critical and somewhat of a perfectionist so I kept wanting to rework and edit my work. NaNoWriMo teaches you to just write and edit later so I sucked my inner editor in and just wrote and by the end of November I’d written just over 50,000 words of my novel and I was so proud of myself! The story itself wasn’t finished though as I knew I had a bit left to write before the ending. I’d vowed to finish it by December and start editing in the new year. But life just got in the way and I was literally too busy to finish it. It was like this when the new year came in as well. My novel was forgotten about, which wasn’t good.

However, a few weeks ago I decided that I would go back to it. I reread everything I’d written and decided to finally finish it. It was hard at first to get back into the swing of things but I soon got into the story and the characters again. I’d missed writing it and the passion was soon showing. I worked hard to get it finished and a few days ago I finally did! I’d completed the first draft of my novel and it was a major relief and a major achievement. 

I now have editing to do and I know that is going to take a while, but by the end of the year/start of next year I am hoping to have a fully finished manuscript and then it will be trying to get it out there. I am so proud of what I have done and I really hope it will all be worth it in the end.

Amy

x