Second Draft Finished!!!

I do not blog enough!

I know this and I have no real excuse.  It's not a lack of news; I've got a lot going on that I could share.  It's not a lack of time; I'm busy, but not so busy that I can't make this more of a priority.  The simple truth is that with everything I am doing, it just doesn't occur to me to blog about it.  I really need to work on that.

A couple of days ago I finally completed the second draft of "The New Americans."  This is the book that's based on the outline my father recorded on cassette tapes before he died in 1992.  Helene and I did an entire podcast show about it called "Legacy: The Novel Writing Experience"  if you simply must know more!  You can find it wherever podcasts are available.

Every writer has a "process," and the nature of that process is a very personal thing.  My first draft is usually me just hammering out the words, not worrying about silly things like pace or even logic to do so.  Then, in the second draft, I endeavor to ... well ... add pace and logic. I like to think of the first draft as deciding on the words I'm going to use and the second draft as putting them in the right order.

Then, with the third draft, I start detailing -- fixing mistakes, adding consistency, and firming up the Voice.  For those of you who don't know what I mean by Voice, I'll do a blog post about it in the near future ... hopefully.
With the fourth draft, I tighten up the book.  What's that mean?  Well, whenever you hear someone say, "That book was a quick read!" or "It was a page-turner!" or "I couldn't put it down!" it means that the author took the time to review the language he or she is using in every single sentence.  Too much passive voice?  Too many verbs "to be?"  Too many adjectives or adverbs?  This exercise usually shaves about ten to fifteen percent off the book's word count.

When the fourth draft is complete, I give the book to Helene. She's my "First Read."  Her job is to read the book with a critical eye and tell me, in detail, what's good or not so good about it.  She's wonderfully and sometimes agonizingly good at this.

With "The New Americans," however, the process is somewhat accelerated.  Because I was working from my father's outline, I was able to kind of merge the first and second drafts.  So, when I say I've finished the second draft of this particular novel, I've really finished my third -- since everything I usually do with the third draft I was able to do with the second in this case.  Does that make sense?

Bottom line: Helene will be getting the third draft of this novel, not the fourth.  And, with luck and hard work, she'll be getting it by the end of August.  The idea of her feedback both thrills and terrifies me.  I'm very  close to this story, maybe too close.

Anyway, that's the news I wanted to share with all of you today.  I'll be back with more soon.  Really.  I will.

Honest.