After completing the read-through on the freshly completed first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we jumped right in on edits. The first step was to go through it together and deal with all the easiest issues. These were mostly things like missing “the”s and other typos that were discovered during the read-through. After that, Jen started at the top of the comments list and Kent started at the bottom, and we hunted down other low-hanging fruit. Now that we’ve had several work sessions devoted to this, the lower branches have been plucked clean and we’re tackling slightly thornier stuff.

Not that any of it counts as “thorny.” We haven’t found anything that throws the whole plot into question or makes us wish our vocation was something easier like yacht-racing. But there are minor continuity things that are spread throughout the manuscript, for example. And there are minor continuity things that only affect a few places, but we need to establish how the story physics do actually work before we can settle on the preferred version and get everything aligned to it. Some of it will take a little discussion, but even the biggest issues that we marked aren’t all that large.

Meanwhile, Jen has also been sneaking in some sessions while Kent day-jobs (can we call it moonlighting if she does it while the sun is out?), and she just completed the 20-page prose outline for Book 2! Then she made Kent read the whole thing aloud in one sitting, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.

A writing partner is someone to divvy up the chores list with.

Last night we finished our first read-through of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1!

Rather than popping the champagne again some more, we devoted the rest of the evening to planning our next moves. There is still a huge amount of work to do on this series. It’s a bit of a learning process because this is the first time we knew going in that we were writing a series. First time we admitted it to ourselves, anyway.

We discussed the possibility of moving on to Ghost Novel #2 right now, leaving the revisions of this manuscript until later. Maybe even getting first drafts done of all four books before circling back, so that we’re not devoting energy to polishing something that might end up changing anyway due to developments in the later books. Of course, by the time we returned to them, our notes about Novel #1 might no longer make any sense to us.

We also discussed the possibility of diving right back in on Novel #1, while it’s fresh, and addressing all those notes we keep complaining about. The worry there is we could be getting farther off-course relative to our original ideas for later books.

What we decided on is a middle path. We will review all our rainbows and partially written synopses and other notes for books 2-4, update those notes based on what we learned while writing book 1, and then tackle the book 1 revisions before we turn our focus to actually writing prose for the next manuscript. That strikes a nice balance of reminding ourselves about series-spanning story features without letting the read-through we just did get too stale.

A writing partner is someone who’d let you drink champagne if you really wanted it.

As soon as we put the finishing touches on the first draft, we started our read-through. That’s a bit of a lie, because we gave ourselves time to pop some champers first.

Reading what you’ve just finished writing is always an interesting experience. You have a set of hopes for how it will come across, and you’re a little nervous about whether it will match them.

In the case of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, it’s holding up great! We find it enjoyable, and while we’ll admit that we’re biased about it we both agree that it really is flowing along well and that the characters and narrative are very strong. There have been moments that made us laugh out loud, and moments that made at least one of us tear up a little.

We are, of course, collecting a sizable list of stuff to fix, but almost all of it is minor continuity bobbles. The name of the made-up country seems to be in dispute, but it should be possible to resolve it without bloodshed or ceding of any lands.

A writing partner is someone who shares pleasure in the results of your combined labors.

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.