Hello dear readers,

It’s been a little bit since I’ve done an update on my NaNoWriMo-esque writing challenge, and funnily enough, I’m actually almost done.

Originally, I’d told myself I’d hit 60,000 words by October 15, but partway through, I realized my first draft may be a bit longer. I wanted to accommodate that, as well as having a bit less time from the short fiction course I signed up for, so I changed my goal to 65,000 words by October 31.

However! I’m happy to say that, as of today (October 15) I’ve already hit 60,000 words on my first draft—60,448 to be exact. 

Now the tricky part. Technically, this draft will likely be complete in the next few days, coming in at around 65,000 words. But, at around 50,000 words, I had one of those brain waves that changed everything: a new character had arrived, one that the book would have felt incomplete without. 

We can blame my new obsession with crime writing for this new character, but either way, there are a number of chapters I’m going to be adding in after this first draft is done. Since I hadn’t wanted to miss my writing goal—and I wasn’t sure how this character would show up in the earlier parts of the novel—I didn’t write anything from their point of view in this draft.

So the next draft will be a sort of hybrid first/second draft. I’ll be adding and changing things throughout the draft I’ve (almost) finished, while writing a first draft of all the chapters with this new character. Confused yet? Me too! (Just kidding. I’m actually quite excited to add them in.)

All this to say: the first draft is almost done—if all goes well, it’ll be finished by the end of this weekend. I’ll likely leave it for a few days (a week?) after that and let it sit before diving into the next draft. Either way, I’m ahead of schedule, and thrilled with all the changes and ideas I’ve been making note of while working on this draft.

And so, I’m on track for where I thought I’d be a month ago. And, the way things have gone, I can still treat November as a month-long revision challenge. At this rate, I have a feeling I’ll get draft three done before December comes around.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear what you’re working on right now.

Hope you’re well ♡

—Catherine

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