I managed to start making some headway today on my SMART goal of finishing the first complete draft of my novel The Do Over this month. Keep in mind that most of the novel is already written... but, it's written as a series of scenes that need to be connected, smoothed over, and polished. So, while it's a lot of work to pull 6,000 words together like I did today, it's not the same as writing them all from scratch.

Each of the scenes I've written (I think there's about 110) has been critiqued at least once. As I go through to complete my first draft, I am:

* incorporating feedback from critique (or ignoring it), as appropriate

* polishing obvious rough spots

* writing transitions between scenes and grouping scenes into coherent chapters

* writing new scenes, or re-writing scenes, as necessary

Today I worked on the collection of scenes that has become Chapter 6. None of these scenes appeared to require major revision and there were no major holes to fill. So even though this was a longish chapter, I was able to get it sewn together within a few hours.

Thus far, I'm over 33,000 words into the complete first draft out of a likely neighborhood of 100,000 for the expected final total. By tomorrow, I'll have passed the "one-third of the way there" mile marker.

Many people ask me what that means in terms of pages. The reason authors don't usually talk in terms of pages is because the number of pages can vary greatly depending upon font size, font type, page size, double-space or single-space, and other constraints that have nothing to do with the actual length of the book. That said, the general rule of thumb is that you'll get roughly 250 words to a page. In my particular case, with my current settings for fonts and margins, I'm on page 107 of the first complete draft out of a likely 350 pages.

Tomorrow's chapter is probably going to be shorter than today's was, but it will also require me to write a new scene completely from scratch. Still, I'll be happy to put Chapter 7 behind me, as that will close the first act of the story and set some fun new story lines into real motion. Gotta get that one nailed tomorrow.

Since the chapter after that launches so many things at once, I'm expecting to have to take both days of the weekend to get it under control. After that, it should be smooth sailing for a week or so as I stitch together pieces that have already been baked for a while. Yee-ha!