So when it comes to things that I've done lately, the last I time updated my blog in July, I wrote that my book was finally almost finished. I mentioned that I would only need to do some minor polishing and that otherwise the manuscript was ready to be sent to the publishers.
After all, since I had worked on the second draft for six months, that amount of work 'had' to mean that I had managed to get almost everything sorted out in the story. There's no way that the third draft would take more than a month at most.
In reality though, once I started working on the third draft, it turned out that I had to spend not one month, but three months to get the draft finished. I had no idea that it would take that much effort to fix the stuff and make the story work.
So when it comes to the reasons that I wasn't finished, the biggest reason was that when I wrote the second draft, I wasn't able to see the 'problems' in the story. I was still inflating the word count and thinking that everything that I wrote made sense.
Indeed, once I started working on the third draft, I noticed that even though I hadn't made any massive mistakes, I had things to do: 1) either trim or completely cut scenes or 2) expand certain scenes that weren't long enough and needed padding.
Not that surprisingly, this cutting and expanding took a lot of effort. Mistakes like having overdescribed situations, having too many inner thoughts, having too many different topics discussed / visiting too many locations when characters traveled were tough to edit out.
Cutting-wise, especially when it came to certain 'kill your darlings' moments, it wasn't that easy to let go of these parts. I tried everything to spare them, moved them around and gave up on them only when it was obvious that they just didn't fit in.
Fortunately, as I kept diligently going and wrote everyday, even though I wasn't feeling great, I kept progressing steadily. I knew that every change was needed and knew that I would reach the finish line, no matter how long it would take.
So thankfully, a week ago I finally managed to reach the last page of the manuscript after spending three months writing at least an hour every day. I managed to get third draft done (103 000 words total), which is an okay accomplishment considering the circumstances.
After all, even though I rarely spent more than ninety minutes per day writing, it wasn't like I didn't have other things going on in my life. These things, like challenging work, practicing piano every day etc. meant that I had to be smart with how I allocated my free time.
In that sense, when it comes to what is going to happen next, I hope that once I'll soon send the manuscript to the publishers, hopefully I'm almost finished with the book. I hope that it wouldn't require that much tweaking anymore.
After all, when you consider how much time I've spent on this project, I think I've spent almost six hundred days writing the book. That's a lot of time to spend on a project considering that I'm used to writing tv specs that usually take like two or three weeks to write.
Still, considering how much effort my third draft took against my expectations, you never know how things go. It's possible that there's still some things to do, so I'd better not get too confident about how completed the book is in its current form.
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