Shouldn’t this feel better?

I think I just finished the first draft of my first novel. It’s around 25,000 words shorter than I thought it would be (I don’t know why I had a word count in mind, maybe that’s stupid). I guess I have to let the feeling settle. You know what it is, why I’m not screaming from the rooftops, happy dancing, et cetera? It’s because now comes the scary part. Reading the entire beast. I haven’t let myself read it while I’ve been writing it. My rule was I had to get through the draft. This was to make me write not edit. But now that’s basically done. I don’t love my ending. I think it needs more substance (the entire beast). I’ve never finished a draft of a long project before. Anyway, I’m either about to feel better or worse when I read this thing. 🙂 I just feel nervous and weird. I also don’t know how I want to read this thing. Do I print it? Do I read it on my laptop? do I make it a pdf to read on a tablet? Beyond those logistics, I feel like I know how I’m going to approach editing it. We’ll see.

Later: It’s sinking in. Finishing this draft. I printed it. All 145 pages (I actually made the font smaller, smaller margins, etc, and got it down to 77 pages printed). I decided that putting it in a binder might make reading through it and managing it easier. I couldn’t find the 3 hole punch (it only punches like 5 pages at a time anyway). So, I used a binder divider as a guide for the holes and drilled holes. It worked. It’s in a binder. I’m starting on my first read-through. I have a section of the binder in the front with notebook paper for notes/to-dos in addition to a few little notes on the paper.

It’s real. I finished a draft of a novel. Didn’t just start it. Didn’t just hit a word count or a page number, I finished it. Finishing it by the end of December was the goal (and I didn’t think that would happen). 11/22. Not bad!  So far the writing is pretty solid too. I’m feeling more excited. This is real. I really finished this draft. So, finishing a draft of a novel is now a thing I can do.  Pretty cool. OK, back to work.