November is over, and I happily stand on top of 50,000 words of extreme future science fiction! The immortal Maki Tanaka First Spring has been wandering along on his million-year journey across the Milky Way. The story is not finished yet, with perhaps another 10,000 words left to go in the first draft, which I plan to finish this month.
After the first draft is finished, my wonderful friends in my new writing group and I will swap stories and critique each other. We will trade advice on what is going well, what needs work, and what to focus on. If any of you are reading this, thanks for being absolutely amazing!
The next step in my book will be to develop the characters, so they are more than props for the main character’s journey. In November’s last days, I didn’t even give the supporting characters names, going instead for placeholders like Leaderman, Otherguy, and Cap2. So they will be the first priority in preparation for draft 2.
After that, I will revisit the structure of the story, taking into account the advice from the alpha readings. Some scenes need to be scrapped, others fleshed out. When I write a first draft, I have to include the transitions between scenes, such as car rides and time spent in waiting rooms, so that I know how the characters are feeling when the interesting parts happen. These transition scenes have very little importance, and can be reduced to a few short sentences, or cut completely.
As happens in NaNoWriMo, I was rushed every day to get my word quota on the page. Because of this, the story jumps from scene to scene, and characters were made up on the fly. Some of the sections feel more like heavy outlines than immersive stories, and not one of the characters other than Maki himself is interesting. Draft 2 will probably be at least 100,000 words, putting it in the normal range of adult science fiction. After that, it may require further structural drafts, and then a prose draft, where I edit each paragraph and sentence to be the best it can be in terms of wordcraft. And after that, it will be time for query letters and publisher submission!
When will it be published? Probably not for a long time. I would be surprised if it takes less than a year. But I can guarantee that sometime in the hopefully not too distant future, you will see the name Christian Horst on the spine of a book in the sci-fi section of a bookstore.
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