wordle – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Bringing Stella Home 2.0 is finished!

Just in time for the new year, too! I finished it at approximately 11:25 pm on New Year’s eve 2010. Here’s the breakdown:

ms pages: 491
words: 136,095
file size: 1,869 KB
chapters: 30
start date: 14 July 2009
end date: 31 December 2009

And the wordle image:

I’m glad to have it finished. It’s got tons of issues with it–way too many for me to show it to an agent/editor–but I think this draft is significantly better than the first one. In particular, I’ve worked on improving the chapter structure: making sure that each chapter has consistent rising action, a central focus, a climax that develops the main story in some way, and compelling transitions that propel the reader into the next chapter. I don’t do any of that very well in first drafts.

So now that the second draft is finished, time to lay it aside for a while and work on something else. After a few months, I’ll be in a better position to pick it up and fix the major issues.

In the meantime, on to something new–in more ways than one!

Happy new year!

Genesis Earth 4.0 is complete!

And it’s about time. I started this back in September, thinking I could easily get it done before World Fantasy 2009. More than a month after the convention, and five days after the last self-imposed deadline, it’s done!

Alright, here are the stats:

ms pages: 270
words: 73,009
file size: 492 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 28 September 2009
end date: 4 December 2009

When I finished, I was listening to “To far away times” from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack. It fit the mood perfectly–absolutely perfectly. The epilogue might be a little cheesy (if you were one of my alpha/beta readers, you’ll know why–thanks, Gini!), but in a good way, I think. Anyways, here’s the track:

It took me forever to finish this draft, but that’s what happens when you’re swamped with school, I guess. If this were the summer and I had nothing else on my plate, I probably could have finished it in 17 days (or less) like the 3.0 draft.

For a more detailed breakdown, here is a graph of my daily wordcount for the project:

Overall, though, I’m very satisfied with my work. I’m sure that if/when it gets picked up by a publisher, they will have a multitude of editorial critiques and suggestions, but I can honestly say this draft is as neat and polished as I can make it.

It’s time to send it out!

Genesis Earth 3.0 is finished!

That’s right! Here are the stats:

ms pages: 269
words: 74,687
file size: 525 KB
chapters: 16, prologue & epilogue
start date: 8 July 2009
end date: 25 July 2009

Wow, I finished this rewrite in seventeen days. Seventeen days! Hard to believe it’s only been that long. I hope the quality of this work went up in that time. I still feel like I need to run through and proofread it, make sure that the language flows well and the dialogue isn’t stilted.

In the process of writing this draft, I added or deleted 37,159 words from the previous draft. Going by the wordcount of the previous draft, 51.98% of the text changed.

Now I need to start submitting this book. It’s going to be kind of hard–I’m not sure whether it’s YA or not. On the one hand, the main characters are older teenagers and experience a lot of personal growth over the course of the novel. On the other hand, the (pseudo)science is a little dense, and the prose isn’t…well, it doesn’t read like most of the YA that I’ve read.

Well, I guess the only thing to do is shop it around and see who picks it up. In the meantime, I’m going to put everything I have into finishing Bringing Stella Home. The 2.0 draft of that novel is going to be AWESOME!

It’s finished!

The second draft of my novel is finished! Yay!

I finished up the last scene of the last chapter of Genesis Earth 2.0 this morning, as well as the epilogue, and sent it out to my beta readers.

Would you believe that I’ve got 25 people reading this thing? That’s almost double as many first readers as I had. More than double the number of first readers who got their comments back to me.

Anyways, here is the wordsplash for version 2.0. The second draft clocked in at about 71k words, significantly more than the first draft (which was about 57k). I added a couple of extra scenes, drew out a couple of other scenes and conversations, and didn’t really cut much out.

But yeah! Finished! Now I need to wait for feedback and let it simmer for a little while. Hopefully, it’s sufficiently polished right now to start shopping around with agents and editors; if not, then a month or two from now I’ll do another rewrite to polish it up and make it really shine.

EDIT: and now, to shamelessly copy Reigheena and what she does when she finishes one of her novels, I’m going to include a rundown of Genesis Earth 2.0’s stats:

pages: 251
words: 71,481
file size: 479 KB
chapters: 14 & epilogue
start date: 28 mar 09
end date: 5 may 09