107,429
(04/10/2011) And then there was a second draft. Yes, it's time for one of my ever-so-infrequent updates on the progress of my novel. And while it's much harder to call this second draft 'done' than it was the first (where I just wrote until I ran out of story, and which point I stopped), this concludes the first stage of editing required.
What this means in hard maths is that a story that was once 119,651 words long is now 107,429. That's a difference of 12,222 words, or about 4 chapters. There are now 29 chapters where there were 33, with very little change to the overarching story, which says something about the flabbiness of my first attempt. Draft 2 is leaner, sexier and more muscular than the first, and while it's still short (or, in actually, long) of my goal of a sub-100k word count, such an objective is now looking achievable by the third go round.
Another key improvement is that the central story caveat is now set in stone. This is obviously something I should have done sometime before I started writing, but, at the end of the first revision, I now actually know what's going on in my own story.
This alone is going to make the next editing session much more enjoyable, and much more productive. With a really solid knowledge of what's going to happen, I can now work on seeding these events earlier on, and cut out anything that isn't relevant to the end goal. Before, I had a vague idea of what was going on, and kind of wrote towards that, often changing ideas or adding new caveats whenever it suited me, effectively writing off huge swathes of story that I'd written previously. It is a lot of fun to play with different ideas, but when experimenting with an idea involves abandoning tens of thousands of words worth of work, it's far from productive.
The next step, now that the ideas are set and the story reads correctly from start to finish, is to go back and polish these ideas, enmesh the technology I've designed more completely with the story. This is the fun part, the bit I like doing most. I get to separate the story into individual strands for each character, and treat each one as if it were its own novella. This way I get to establish the characters and their voices more completely, but I also get to add in and polish lots of little details that I may have overlooked when writing the broad story arcs, the fun little clever bits that make a science fiction story enjoyable to write.
To use an analogy I know very little about, the body of the building is now complete, and it's not going to fall down. The next step is to add the facade, the adornment that makes it stand out from all those other buildings.
