A Long, Slow Process

I haven’t blogged much about writing recently but that’s because I’ve been working on a long, slow project.

For a few years now I’ve been working on a couple of novels but one in particular is the most complete.

It’s a novel about a working mum, who struggles to find the right balance between her work and her home life.

After completing a very rough first draft I started an online course with Writing Magazine where for each assignment I submitted a chapter which was critiqued and re-written before sending the next chapter.

The course was good and really gave me the confidence to improve the rest of the novel. 

It took me a while but I completed a second and then a third draft and then sent it for feedback to the Romantic Novelist’s Association for a critique on the New Writers’ Scheme.  After receiving some positive feedback I redrafted it again and then sent it to my online writers’ group.

By this stage I actually felt that it was almost complete but it was still too long, so on my next read-through I cut out all the superfluous words and sentences I could find, aiming to reach for a total word count of 100,000.

I slashed and burned and killed my darlings but by the end of this draft I still had a wordcount of 108,000 words.

So, during January I have been laboriously working through the entire novel and yesterday I managed to achieve a word count of 99,999 words – yeh!

Now I need to dust off my synopsis – thankfully already written, research possible agents and then hopefully, in the very near future, I will be in a position to allow my child to fly the nest. 

I’ve been working so long on this project that I day I send it out for the first time will be a champagne day as far as I’m concerned – regardless of the outcome.