Baby Leopards, Pretty Stationery and Finished 1st Drafts

I finished writing the first draft of my fantasy story! Happy Dance time! I celebrated with the age old – lets eat lots of yummy food – method. Chinese takeaway, ice cream and, okay, I had other desserts too!

This post is literally just me patting myself on the back and explaining this is why I’ve been less crafty on the blog lately. I was a little busy!

I started writing at the start of November for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where I managed to write 11 chapters/45k of my book. I had planned to only do about one chapter a month after that, which would have me finishing around about July but…. Well, I got carried away and I ended up finishing the whole thing on February 3rd.

Why does the exact date matter? Well, the last first draft I wrote took me 9 months, so I called it my baby. But after a conversation with my dad about gestation periods of animals I found out that the average gestation of a leopard is 93 days…. So this story is now dubbed, Leo the Baby Leopard. I think this might be a thing going forward. Naming my first drafts after animals that take that long to be born.

ANYWAY

I recently downloaded the tumblr app again (I deleted it a year ago because it sucked out way too much time), mainly for looking up writing advice. And I found this little nugget:

I’d written it August 2016. That’s the day that my main character walked in to my head and where the story started. Looking back and realising that actually no, those two days were not wasted and I have actually written the story is – surreal. There’s still a long way to go, but it was a nice reminder of how far I’ve come.

I’ve already started the editing process – I know a lot of advice is to leave it for a while first but I have certain things I know I need to fix already so I’m going to do those first (plus edit auto corrects, which there are a lot of!) and then set it to the side for a few weeks when I go on holiday next month. But I did take time out to buy myself some pretty, new stationery.

 

I probably won’t even use them but I’m already drowning in the unknown waters of editing and while pretty stationery won’t keep me afloat they’ll definitely make me feel better.

I’ve also attempted to blurb the story again. My first effort was absurdly terrible but this effort was mildly less rubbish. A step in the right direction at least. But condensing 100k and distilling the story into an alluring 200 words is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I’m not exaggerating when I say its 100x more difficult to me than writing the first draft itself!

 

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Any other writers struggle with the blurb? If anyone has any tips for an editing newbie then I’m all ears. Lifejackets will be appreciated.

 

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