The last day

I meant to finish the first draft of my current novel project last weekend, but I stopped a couple of pages short. I didn't want to rush into it, and -- typical -- I had to be somewhere in the early evening, so I cut my writing day short.

Then I thought I would be able to grab a few hours during the week, ideally on Monday, and finish. It was only a few pages. But instead I got utterly hammered at work. In my 12 years in the high tech industry, I don't think I've ever been as snowed under as I was this week. In fact, I'm seriously considering going in to work on Sunday just to get a head start on the next week.

I rarely write about my day job as a technical writer at a large software company. It's something I've been doing for several years one way or another, but I've only been a true technical writer since the fall of 2004 -- three years and then some. I have been able to handle pretty much everything that's been thrown at me, but this week my relative inexperience meant that I had too much to do at the very end of the project -- a project which I've thought was done about six times now. It's not all my fault, but there's more I could have done to alleviate the crush that happened this month.

Another motherfucking learning experience.

Meanwhile, I read a little piece of this book I'm working on for the first time last night to a few people at a dinner. It was a very interesting experience. When you're reading out loud you can instantly tell which sentences are well constructed and which sound awkward -- which is why they tell you to always, always read your stuff out loud before considering it finished. It made me remember how, in my past experiences at LitCrawl (2006, 2005) I closely edited the piece I was about to read with a mind to how it would sound read out loud. I didn't have the opportunity to do that last night, and it was good to be reminded of how important it is.

So on to the last few pages of this book, which I will subsequently spend as much time as I can rewriting. (Rewriting the whole book, not only the last few pages, important as they are.)

Update, 3:45 pm: I finished! The total word count of the first draft was 85,293. That's an average of 2031 words per session, with the book finished in 42 work sessions from July 28 to today.

Previous first-draft-finishing milestones:

Make Nice on January 1, 2003. That one took about five years.

Bangalored (which used to be called "Dear Prudence") on December 28, 2006. That one took a little more than two years.

technorati: writing, novel writing