At 4pm on December 31st, I completed Arkaya Draft 4. It ended at 124,220 words, according to Scrivener - Microsoft Word dropped the total wordcount to 121k. I actually feel good about it! Since finishing Draft 3 a month and a half ago, I put in well over 100 hours editing this thing. I went through maybe a hundred problems, from large items that impacted nearly every one of my 53 scenes, to smaller items that only hit a couple of sentences. I also rewrote almost 40k words in the first 16 or so scenes - the piece of Draft 3 that I wrote in 2015.
Cali shows my mood pretty well, after that final push - I was exhausted when I finished.
Arkaya Draft 4 is out to 6 people for commentary (including the Manuscript critique I won from the Ink & Insights competition last year) and I've got a "lot" of spare time on my hands. Time to fill it with other things:
I bought myself a video game (Dishonored 2) back in November, and forbade myself from playing it until I was done. The game, which is actually a sequel, included the first one as a digital copy, so I started playing that this weekend. It's a lot of fun, and I've forgotten how much I enjoyed such an immersive world. It's gritty and gruesome but I love it!
Another thing I've been holding off on doing was reading about writing. I'm planning on reading several books I've collected over the last month: a book on outlining (more on that later), Publishing 101 by Jane Friedman, Author in Progress by the wonderful collaborators at Writer Unboxed, and the 2017 Writer's Market. I've been looking for ways to improve my craft, but I didn't want to mess with it while editing Arkaya. Now I'm "free" and can explore!
And of course, I've been thinking about my next project. I've got a Fantasy Romance novella that I've been playing around with for a few months, that I will be adding to, but my big push for the next three months will be getting Larodia's story outlined and ready for the first draft. Historically I have been mostly a discovery writer (aka a pantser, for those familiar with Nanowrimo). My first drafts generally come together in a flash of badly-written words, tossed at the page. They need Total rewrites. (Arkaya went through 2 total rewrites, and the 4th draft was maybe a half-rewrite). A dear writing buddy recently did a month of planning for her draft before she wrote it in November, and her results (a first draft that she doesn't think needs a total overhaul(!)) have encouraged me to try it as well. I don't know how much outlining I can handle before it starts choking the life out of the story, but I'm going to give it my best shot. I'm hoping to write the first draft of Larodia's Book 1 in April. And maybe Book 2, if I can get that properly outlined.
Once the comments start coming in on Arkaya, I'll be sorting through those. My rough plan with Arkaya is to start sending it out to agents by the end of 2017. That may change, but I think it's a reasonable goal.
But for now, I'm basking in the glow of having finished a draft, and just letting my writer-mind recover. (And trying not to get too worked up over the fact that six people are now reading my writing.... Eeek!)