So, now what?
It’s finished. I completed one of the longest-term goals I’ve ever had in my life.
What now?
Well, for starters, there are rewrites. Copious amounts of rewrites at that. I’ve already completely overhauled my first draft to be more compliant with “standard” formatting rules (something with which I allowed myself a good bit of leeway while I was writing the first draft because I didn’t want to get too caught up with the formatting and not end up finishing the story itself). In fact, the few of you whom have read all or part of the first draft would hardly recognize the current draft.
At this point, I’m waiting on story critiques from a couple of people and working on tightening up what I have now to reduce the page count (which is now up to about 104 or 105).
But, since that story is done – all I have left is polishing up and maybe cleaning up some confusion about the story time line – I have all the stories I had put on hold coming up and crawling all over me trying to get out. Four of them, to be specific.
It’s a bit overwhelming. These stories have lived in my head and in hastily written notes on my hard drive for so long that I am dying to work on them. All of them. But I know me. And I know that I need to focus on just one for now… and I don’t know which one I want to work on first.
I think perhaps I’m going to try outlining each one in much more detail than what I currently have and see which one seems to speak loudest to me.
