It’s the end of the month. My read-through is complete, my spreadsheet has been filled out and I am ready to embark on draft 2.
Here are some stats on my progress so far.
Total scenes in first draft: 69
Total wordcount in first draft: 83,000
Number of scenes that made it to draft 2: 31
Points of view dropped: 1
Subplots discarded: 2
Characters expunged: 11 (!!)
Characters merged: 2
Cliches obliterated: 3
Times I loved the story: very few
Times I bemoaned my decision to be a writer: lots
Times I required alcohol: most of them
Bright moments of hope for my career: one and a half
Cups of coffee consumed: 4 hot, 1 cold
Plotting for my new story is on track, but I think it will be a while before I start writing as I have a lot of new writing to do on the revision piece. But that’s okay. I have all year.
How about you? How did you do? How are you feeling? Are you even still here? Post about your progress below, or link to a blog post of your own.
Not Enough Words 
I’m way late it checking in but better late than never! At the end of January I had made it 25% into my read through. There were two times when I got all excited about improving the story when new ways to restructure scenes came to me. Mostly I realised that it takes a long time to read a novel…
Wonderful progress Merilee! Great post as well. Thanks for sharing. ;)
Stats for my novella (I added word count for draft 2):
Total scenes in first draft: 18
Total word count in first draft: 38,500
Word count in second draft: 30,500
Number of scenes that made it to second draft: 19
Points of view dropped: 0
Subplots discarded: 0
Characters expunged: 3
Characters merged: 1
Clichés obliterated: 0
Times I loved the story: mostly
Times I bemoaned my decision to be a writer: never
Times I required alcohol: bleh
Bright moments of hope for my career: a few
Cups of coffee consumed: 0
I should add
Times I felt the whole enterprise is crap and should be burned in plasma fire: constantly
yay! it sounds like a successful first month to me :-) I think I’ll have to do my own post about it!
I’m voting for week 4 as being the suckiest week of 2012. I haven’t finished the read-through yet and I hoping to reclaim my lunch writing time this week. Hopefully.
Wow! Way to set the bar, Merrilee!
Merilee, sounds like you have made some solid progress. Keep up the good work! :)