two years and four drafts later

Friday night, I finished the fourth draft of HotP (still a working title, but in my brain this is what it will always be called). Including editing passes, there now exists six different versions of this novel.

Each one I love a little more than the last.

Two years ago, in January of 2021, coming up on the first anniversary of the pandemic in the United States, I sat down and said to myself something along the lines of: “Hey. Let’s try and draft a fantasy novel for funsies and see what comes out of it.”

I spent about a month and a half on it. It was my first successful stab at a full first draft outside of NaNo. I managed 55,000 words in that initial draft, with more words ready for a sequel of sorts that I ended up pulling parts of into the second draft. Which I did for NaNo in 2021, and continued working on through December that year to finish up the full second draft with around 85,000 words.

I was immensely proud of the second draft for a number of reasons. I had tried doing a second draft of a previous project back in 2016-2017-2018 and just could not find the motivation to rewrite the same story from scratch. But this time I did it. And while I picked up bits and pieces and dropped others, it was still the same story at its core.

I was excited about draft two, because this was the one I printed out. This is the one I went and got a hard copy of, if only for me to try editing by hand. I loved this version of the story, more than the first, but the more I worked through it on editing, the more I was dissatisfied. I found myself dragging through the last fifty pages of edits, because I was realizing something very important:

This was not the final version of the story.

That realization sucked a lot. Here I was, already a year into working on this novel, and finding that I did not like how it was written or how the story moved. It took me over two months to do edits on something that had taken less time to write. And the day after I finished the last page of editing, I went back to my laptop and opened a blank word document to start all over.

Here is how I know it was a good idea to start for the third time: I was more excited about the prospect of writing my story over again than I had been in the weeks prior working on editing.

The third draft took me from mid-April (2022) to early July (2022). 125,000 words, working on the draft only Monday through Friday. I was worried about burn-out, after working on this project for so long already between the second draft and editing. For that draft, it really worked for me.

For the third draft, I did a lot of things different in terms of plot that I had left out before. I added a significant chunk to the early part of the story to help set things up better. I kept the story predominantly in the same location/city in the novel, whereas both of the first two drafts involved travel to another location/city. I started to build out the world a little more as well as how the magic in the world actually worked.

But I was still scratching the surface of things. While I was writing those early chapters in the third draft, I think a part of me already knew I would be doing a fourth draft at that point. And I was okay with that thought being in the back of my head, because it was getting easier to write this book each time.

Editing of the third draft lasted until around September. I do not actually remember exactly when I wrapped it up, my mind already focusing on fifty other things (including but not limited to prepping for NaNo 2022 in November, planning a vacation with my partner that happened in October, and running my first half-marathon race [also in October]).

At the time I wrapped up editing on the third draft, I was feeling really satisfied with this version of the story. I liked the characters, I liked the plot, I liked the relationships. I still needed to expand more on the magic and a few other details, but I felt that maybe I could flesh those out better with another editing pass. I set HotP aside for a couple of months and shifted my focus to the first draft of a companion novel, which I refer to as TSE and is also set in the same world as HotP, for NaNo 2022.

I spent all of November writing out the first draft of TSE. I had had the idea for how this companion novel would go, what it would involve and revolve around, sometime in June. I will come back and talk more about that at a later time, though, because as much as I love the basis and drive for that story, today is about HotP.

I finished the first draft of TSE right on the 30th of November, at 75,000 words. I do not love it but it is out there and it will give me something to build from when I inevitably come back for a second draft.

I woke up on December 1st and choose violence to rewrite HotP from a blank page for the fourth time.

I said it before, but I love each version of this novel more than the last. I love this version of it the most, and I feel like it really shows based on how fast I wrote it: 120,000 words in 51 days. December 1st, 2022 to January 20th, 2023. I had given myself a deadline of February 28th to have it done. I worked on it every day, and even on the days where I was only able to write a few dozen words because of time constraints or a dip in motivation, I am proud of the time that went into this thing.

I am proud of the novel it is and has become. I cut out that big chunk from the beginning that I had added to the third draft. I shifted the order of a few scenes around. I began building out the magic system more, to something that I really love and think works well.

I already know that there are some important parts that need tweaking when I come back through to edit, be that in a few days or a few weeks (I am enforcing a bit of a break, though I am excited to start working on it again). But overall, I really love this version of the novel.

This story is both the same and completely different from the original draft I wrote back in January of 2021. It is insane to me to think that this whole thing started on a whim, with absolutely no notes or plot plan, because of some vibes and feelings I had two years ago.

I cannot say that it is the last draft from scratch, because who knows what things I will stumble upon that I want to redo entirely during editing. But I am happy with how it is going, and happy that, even if it does end up being rewritten again, I am that much closer to putting this novel out there as a physical book.