On Tuesday, 10 August, I finally got to type the two sweetest words in the English language: “The end”.

After nearly 10 years (I had the idea in the summer of 2000 and started writing in December of that year), I finished the first draft of my first novel, Resurrect.

Now, I don’t write in the typical successive draft approach, so this draft is not going to be far off from the finished product. I do call it my “first draft” though, because it still needs some work.

For one thing, I need to update it for 2010 because I started it in 2000. Some of the things in it are now out of date. I also need to flesh out some descriptive scenes and intensify some of the action scenes. Additionally, because in many cases I did not want to break my writing rhythm, I didn’t stop to research a thing as it came up (or in the case of the 80 pages I wrote while on a writing retreat in a cabin in NH, I couldn’t because I had no internet access). Instead, what I would do in cases like this, was to leave an underscored blank line in the passage–not entirely unlike a “Fill in the blank” question on a test. So I have to go back and look those things up and fill in my blanks. Finally, I have to edit the whole thing and format the whole thing properly.

I expect that all that work will take me until early September, with a personal target date of 13 Sept for completion. Right now, the manuscript is about 97,000 words, which I am informed is in the ballpark for a typical thriller novel’s length. (Thanks again to Jeremy Robinson, for clearing that up for me.)

Of course, you don’t actually write the words “The end” at the end of a novel manuscript. But in this case, I felt it was warranted to type the words and look at them for a few moments before deleting them and clicking save.

I’m back to working on my first mystery novel while I let Resurrect sit for a few days before diving back into it.

-Kane
15 August 2010