Finished!
NaNoWriMo ends today, but I finished my own draft yesterday afternoon, with time to spare. The total draft clocked in at 77,722 as counted by the NaNoWriMo word goblins, but Microsoft Word counts it as 78,707*. That’s about 10,000 more words than the original draft for After the Service, a NaNoWriMo product from 2006. My estimate for this book was 80K, so I’m fairly pleased with where it ended up. There’s lots of room for cutting if need be, once I rewrite it–and heaven knows it needs plenty of rewriting. This draft is puts the “rough” in “rough draft.” But hey, that’s what NaNoWriMo is for.
And now, I get to forget it entirely. December is devoted to rewriting David Kelter’s previous mystery, All That Death–I’ll be blogging bits and pieces of that process, as well. I will come back to this draft once that whole process is entirely finished, and AtD is published, hopefully sometime this spring.
“This draft,” by the way, has a new name–I’ve ditched The Murder School, and am currently calling it Degrees of Murder. Get it? Because, you see, he graduates.
