Where I'm at with the Novel

I have a fairly complete first draft of my novel at this point. In all my earlier attempts at novel writing, this is where it ended. Maybe I could have worked further on them, tried to fix all the problems and revise them, but I decided that in each of those cases, even putting in all that work would still result in a crappy book that I would not let anyone suffer through reading. Those attempts were fundamentally flawed in ways I didn't know how to fix - or didn't believe it was possible to fix.

Now I have a book that - yes, it needs substantial revision, but I already know specifically what needs work. I know what I'm trying to accomplish and have an idea how to get this story to that point. I think learning to outline helped me get this far this time.

Right now I'm doing a little research to make the science part make sense. This is not a 'hard' Sci-Fi story, but what I'm going for is for the ideas to be internally consistent. If things could work the way they do in my story, I want those things to be logical and consistent with one another.

I felt that I was procrastinating on the novel, but what I now think is happening is that I'm doing so much other writing I don't have that itch of the novel as my only project poking at me. I'm writing this blog nice and regularly now, along with my weekly (and more) flash fiction stories, and some writing I now get to do for the day job. I haven't written in my journal either since the new year started. I think the blog is filling that itch as well, but I know there are internal and personal things that my journal would help me work through.

It would be easy to chalk it up to not having enough time to do it all, but I know if I look at things frankly, there is time. I just need to be better about using it. Prioritize. Improve my work flow and time management. Not a lot even. Just little tweaks. So that's what I'll be working on.

I'd love to go from 'fairly complete first draft' to totally complete, ready for serious revisions first draft within a month. I'm posting this here to keep myself accountable. So a month from now I will post my progress on the novel again, and set a new goal depending on my success or failure to get this first milestone accomplished.

Let's go!