Reviewing August and the Blogging Absence

I was actually away from my computer far more often than I thought I would be in August, and so I was away for...a while. But I’m back with an August recap and news!

To name a few of the August events:

• I turned twenty-one. Cake and ice cream were involved, and family movie marathons. (My grandparents came over to watch Star Trek: Into Darkness and Tangled the day before my birthday. Then the day of my birthday, I started a marathon of The Lord of the Rings (extended editions!).
• I got my free hardcover proof copy from LuLu. I used my winner’s code to get a copy of The Assassin’s Daughter in print. A different format has made it easy to spot things that need fixing. (Every time I think I have them all, I notice another. *sigh*  Baby steps.)
• I participated in this Instagram challenge, and it was quite fun.
• And I focused mostly on finishing the first draft of The Luckless Ones. 

Which brings us to September.

Though when I started writing The Luckless Ones in April for Camp NaNo, I thought it would eventually be about 50,000 words in length, but as I started working through the story, it just didn’t seem to have enough material there to reach that word count. So, I decided to work toward 25,000 words instead. 

At the beginning of August I was rather far behind where I wanted to be, so I decided to start focusing mainly on finishing this draft. With my playlist for TLO playing in the background (or Once Upon A Time reruns, depending on my mood and my location), I got to work.

Most of the writing happened over this weekend (especially Saturday and Sunday). Since The Luckless Ones was handwritten, I tried to only use my laptop when I was typing those words into the document. (A task I just finished a couple of hours ago, actually.)

To my surprise: this draft far surpassed 25,000 words. The last words were written at 12:12am on September 1 (only a few minutes over my goal finish day).

It’s messy, and I’m going to have to do a lot of work before I ever start the second draft, but I’m proud of it. The Luckless Ones is my first long work of contemporary fiction (a genre I usually only dabble in for scripts and short stories). I tackled some new subjects and situations, and it was fun to take these characters through their stories. I definitely think the characters are the strongest aspects of this draft, and they offered up quite a few surprises. Now I have a better idea of the type of story they belong to, so it should be fun to rework the ideas from the first draft when I decide to revise it.

I don’t think I will be as absent as I was in August this month, so hopefully I can finish some of the blog post ideas I’ve been working on.