First Draft Complete

I finished the first draft for Aileen 6 yesterday. The idea that this part of the process is finally at an end is taking some time to sink in. This morning I woke up at my usual time despite promising myself I’d sleep in. After breakfast and puttering around the house for a little bit, I wandered into my office, not knowing what else to do with myself. Hence this blog post.

The first few days after completing a draft, I’m usually at odds and ends. It takes time for my brain to catch up to the fact it doesn’t need to run as fast or hard. This is about the time I resume regular activities like cleaning my house, cooking dinner, grocery shopping, etc. There’s a period of high productivity after a draft ends. That meant yesterday, minutes after finishing, I hurried to the grocery store and bought all the fruits and veggies in sight. I cooked dinner for my husband and me and cleared the office desk of all the scraps of paper that contained ideas for the book. You could say I restored order to my chaos.

I predict this order will only last another few days and then the fatigue and brain fog that comes with an end will set in. At that point, I become a human shaped slug and start binging books and TV. For now though, I’m going to see how much I can get done before that happens.

I’m quite excited with this draft. This is the first book in at least four or five books where I’ve written it from beginning to end. No abandoning it to restart once I hit a wall. Right now, there is no plan to rewrite a significant chunk either. There might be some massaging here and there. A little context added and a scene or two inserted. But it’s not tearing out half the book to replace it with more words. Of course, that might change once I start the read through, but for now I am flush with victory and the hope that one day I will go back to writing drafts that aren’t complete gut jobs.