I am happy to announce that in the early hours of this morning, I finished the first draft of “Dead Rock Star”. Weighing in at about three hundred words less than my 60,000 target, I am very pleased with the result. Now we move onto phase two, the second draft where I go back, re-read what I’ve done, flesh out characters and scenes and generally “polish the turd”. For my records, I started the initial phase of the project on at 15.24 on 03 September 2005 and finished the eighteenth chapter, the epilogue, at 01.34 on 12 November 2005.
Now I am in two minds how to continue. Should I have a little rest and then return to do the second draft? I do have some regular work to get on with, so this takes precedence. For the second draft, I am planning to spend about a week on it and I think it might just boost the word count up by 10,000 words.
I was reading somewhere that it was a good idea for a first time author to keep their first novel relatively short. The idea is that publishers aren’t keen to take on wordy first tomes because the reading public aren’t always prepared to read through an epic from an unknown. Instead, you should start with a novel of around 65,000 – 80,000 words and if/when your profile increases your word count can. A good example of this would be the Harry Potter books, which have got longer and longer with the increasing popularity of JK Rowling’s work.
Of course, this could all be a load of old bollocks.

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