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Recently I’ve had two things happen.
- I’ve started retouching an old first draft into the second draft that I’ve had sitting around for a long time (read: 8 years)
- I finished a first draft and sent it off to my beta reader for some much-needed sense-checking
Now I love my first drafts. When they get finished I am one hundred percent deeply in love with them. They are perfection itself and I can’t change them. So I send them off to my favourite readers and ask them to comment, and then when the comments come back I read them, and put the book in a drawer (or a folder) for a few months until I stop being in love with it.
So I pulled my first draft of the first book out of the folder and started to read it. “That’s funny,” I thought. “I’m sure it had a different beginning.” I had a look through my very old memory sticks and yes, lo and behold, I had already started to do a re-write into draft two. Except that the re-write was terrible. Somewhere in the last eight years I had started draft two of this particular book, and then stopped, probably because it wasn’t going the way I liked. This is unusual for me. I normally like my second versions, but this one was just… not right. I ended up scrapping the old draft two and going all the way back to draft one, and starting draft two all over again. This time I feel I can keep going. This time, I’m back to being in love with it.
Then I got my first draft of the other book back from my beta reader, and I read the comments. “Loved it!” she said. “But I have questions.” She’d written them in, extensively. I thought about them, and agreed with most of them. But I just can’t dive back into the second draft immediately. I’m sure if I had someone breathing down my neck or giving me a deadline I could, but since I don’t, I have put it away in a folder for later, and let my brain quietly mull the comments and questions over while I work on the first book. At some point I’m going to open that folder and file again, and start draft two in earnest, but until then I’m happy to just think it over.
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