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And so it begins.

To the left, observe the first draft of Muse - or whatever it ends up being called - in all its double-spaced single-sided glory. I managed all of ten pages today - the first chapter - though it felt slightly strange, as though they weren't my words at all and it didn't matter if I was brutal.

Which I was. There was hacking and slashage. There may even have been a machete involved somewhere, I can't quite recall. Suffice it to say that I've already spotted a couple of bits that I think belong elsewhere in the text, along with the beginnings of a sub-plot that I know I didn't write about anywhere else in the whole story.

I'm going to aim for a chapter or ten pages a day, whichever is longest. If I can mange that then I should be done with the first pass hard copy edits this time next month and I'll be able to make the necessary changes, give it a polish and start passing it on to first readers before the start of June.

That's the plan anyway. Whether I stick to it or not remains to be seen. If there's one thing I've learned in the course of writing this novel (writing that word still leaves me waiting for someone to snigger at me for being so stupid as to think I could ever do such a thing) it's that the book's the boss, and the boss rarely lets things go according to plan.

98,203 / 98,203 (100.0%)

More-or-less, anyway.

Okay, let's be honest here. There are bits that I need to fill in, mostly marked in caps, dotted all around the manuscript. Unless I'm very much wrong, they'll add up to at least another 5,000 words, but the story's there, even if it's just in brief in parts, and that's what matters. I've also got several large chunks earmarked for deletion in the first editing pass, but that's what editing's for, so I don't think that's a big deal either.

I've written 98,203 word first-draft manuscript. Who'da thunk it?

And now, I think, a little rest both for me and the manuscript. For me, a couple of days, then I'm going to tackle some of the short stories that have been clamouring for my attention for the last four months. For the manuscript, I think, at least six weeks should do the trick. Long enough for me to forget most of it, anyway.

A sudden, sickening, horrible thought hit me as I was finishing the 1,800 words that I wrote tonight:

There a part of my story in which nothing really happens. Worse, though, is the fact that that part of the story accounts for most of the damn novel, or at least so it seems to the sleep-addled brain sitting in my head.

Actually, I suspect I'm being rather unfair to myself. The reason for things rambling a bit in the midsection is not, as part of me fears, that I'm a terrible writer and can't structure an interesting novel to save my life, but rather that I wrote a lot of it during NaNoWriMo and so haven't really thought about the story in that part of the novel all that much, much as it pains me to admit it.

Once again I'm reciting my new mantra to myself over and over again: It's okay to suck; don't get it right, get it written, it's okay to suck. Hopefully the editing process will save me, even if it does mean rewriting large chunks to make them exciting, interesting, motivating, deifying... Anything else that rhymes with -ing!

Speaking of editing, I printed out the manuscript thus far tonight, after listening to ISBW and hearing Mur say that she did the same thing. Double spaced, single sided, 63,000 words comes to 213 pages, which doesn't include tonight's work.

That's a rather daunting pile of paper sitting on the floor next to my desk. Let's hope I have the guts to edit it (that can go in the letter to Santa, just after the line that says: Dear Santa: Please don't let me be crap, please, please, please....

Let's hope that Santa doesn't realise that I haven't believed in him since I was nine, then...

I've finished NaNoWriMo 2005, as evidenced by the image below:

So that's about half of the actual novel out of the way. At the moment, as of 50,100 words (NaNo's word counter treats hyphenated words oddly, I think), the hero, the heroine and the hero's mate are sat in the hero's kitchen having a well deserved drink.

I think I might join them. In a metaphysical sense, of course.

I wrote all of fifty words today. No, less than fifty words, in fact: forty-nine.

That, my friends, sucks. And it sucks lots.

But at least I stopped writing about vomiting, which is a blessing.