Late last night, Kent finished the final scene of As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, bringing an end to our first draft. Sort of.

While we have technically reached the end of the prose portion of the program (after something like 15 months), there are some decorative flourishes we still need to add. Jen made a good start on the epigraphs we like to put at the beginning of each chapter, but we probably don’t have enough of those yet. We won’t know exactly how many we need until we actually smoosh the scenes together into chapters. So that’s something else we have to do. And as we wrote, we marked a few places that we know need attention, so now we also need to go back and attend to those. But that’s more of a second draft thing.

Let’s not lose sight of the important part: the first draft is complete! Celebratory beverages all around!

A writing partner is someone with whom to bask in your accomplishments (and savor your victory meal).

Kent has been on a roll, knocking out at least one scene each work session. We knew this section would go fairly quickly (it’s an exciting high-stakes action sequence), but we’re a little stunned by the blinding speed we’re achieving. A lot of the credit goes to Kent, but Jen’s been pulling her weight, too. She jumped ahead and picked up a weighty scene after all the whiz-bang pyrotechnics were played out, and now she’s taking another hop forward.

This approach, with Kent chasing behind Jen and filling in the gaps, is much more efficient than playing leapfrog would have been. If we’d tried to alternate our way through, we would have spent as much time talking about exactly how the pieces lined up as we would doing the writing. This way any continuity errors can be blamed on Kent alone, saving us tons of time ;)

All that to say, we have fewer than a dozen scenes to go. (Eight. We have eight scenes left. At least until Kent’s fingers hit the keyboard for an hour.) Those remaining scenes will mostly be longer, and our pace will slow, but the end is nigh! We’re excited to see the light at the end of this tunnel, and all those clichés. It had been a long time since we wrote a novel, and it’s very gratifying to know we’re still capable of doing it. With any luck, the next one will go a little quicker.

A writing partner is someone who plunges your smoking fingers into a bowl of ice when you’ve been typing too fast.

As we work on the climax of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we’re finding that the scene lengths are suddenly shorter. This is entirely expected, because setting up the dominoes takes a lot longer than knocking them down. It’s good for morale, because we feel like we’re writing faster.

We say we aren’t surprised that these scenes are shorter, but a more honest take is that we were only surprised briefly. There was a moment of confusion about it, because the fact that this is what everything’s been leading up to kind — it’s the biggest big deal in the book — implies that these scenes should take up a disproportionate page count. Also, there’s a lot going on! These are mostly action scenes. Again, that means it’s a good thing that they’re concise, but they feel so weighty that their brevity is counterintuitive. That mental disconnect, that an event’s magnitude within the story isn’t related to how many words it takes to describe it, is a lesson that we seem to relearn on each project.

A writing partner is someone to get excited with during the exciting part.

Even with a process that’s as overengineered as ours, sometimes things get missed. Despite all the meticulous planning, despite the extra set of eyes, we sometimes end up needing to retrofit something into the prose that we considered finished.

Now, a lot of sources of writing advice would say “never look back,” and that in such cases you should just make a note about it and keep going. There is the danger of working endlessly without ever actually reaching the end, that polishing Act I can become one’s way of procrastinating about finishing the story. Here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC, we don’t let that worry us too much. We have plenty of other ways to procrastinate!

Without giving anything away, there is a late event in the outline that we’ve known about all along, but what we overlooked was a bit of specific groundwork to support it. Once we decided on what those missing details should look like, Jen made a stub for it. Only this stub wasn’t numbered, because we didn’t know exactly where we’d be putting it. Figuring out where that would be, and then wedging open a spot so it could fit, turned out to be the trickiest part. Kent looked at the completed scenes that were from the proper POV and involved the right locales and so on. Our game plan was to just inject a paragraph or three into one of those. That didn’t turn out to be feasible, so it became its own scene. Which meant we needed to frame it, give the POV character a motivation other than “make this exposition sound casual.” Which led to a smoother arc for that character.

We certainly could have left it for the second draft. But, that late event is kind of a big deal so it’s good for our peace of mind to know that it really does work. If we’d been like a shark and just kept swimming forward, we would have been writing tons of stuff on the basis of an untested assumption that it would end up working out. So if it hadn’t, if we had somehow goofed up our timeline and there was no way things could work like we wanted… Well, best not to contemplate such a universe.

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep moving ahead, but will also go back with you if that’s what it takes.

…of the first draft of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel Number One.

Jen is working on the final batch of stubs, which will take us through the climax and then out the other side to the denouement. Kent meanwhile has been writing the scenes that lead right up to the climax. We’re probably around 75% of the way through, which maybe doesn’t qualify as “eerily close” but it does feel like we’ve hit the home stretch.

The manuscript’s word count is just shy of 112,000. Our list of things that we need to punch up and/or mention more often stands at about two dozen, so it’ll be interesting to see how big the second draft ends up being. We expected these books to be smaller than our usual, in fact we worried about them coming out too small on account of the series being broken up into four rather than three novels. It’s looking like we had nothing to worry about!

A writing partner is someone to make the journey with, however long it turns out to be.

We know you’re all desperate to see more of our vacation snaps, but you’ll have to wait one more week because we have an exciting announcement: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1 has passed the 100,000 word milestone! (101,313 to be exact.) We plan to pop the champagne tonight since we don’t generally work on Fridays. The advice is to write drunk and edit sober, but why waste the fun on a work session?

Speaking of Sssssynergy!

Jen needed to create the next batch of stubs, so meanwhile Kent was still writing prose and using up the leftovers from the previous batch. This is a normal mode that comes up from time to time in our workflow. Depending on how many new stubs Jen decides to make, and how fast each of us is going, and whether there’s a comet or an eclipse viewable from Earth, there’s usually a bit of a fudge factor. Sometimes Kent runs off the end of the existing stubs, and sometimes Jen rejoins him in the prose-generating hamster wheel sooner than that.

But once in a while we time it perfectly, which is what just happened. Jen completed the final new stub during the same work session that Kent wrapped up prosification of the last of the old ones!

Go team!