Finishing a First Draft

It's always so exciting, and then...you stare down the barrel of so much editing

I’m riding the high of finishing the first draft of the second Iron Hex book this evening and thought it would be fun to give a post-mortem on the writing experience of this book.

You may remember the post I made touting how fun it was to write a sequel at the start of the book a few months ago. That post still rings true…………when you’re starting a book.

After the first little bit of the book? Writing a sequel gets much much more difficult.

I was plagued with questions like:

Would my character actually act like this?

Are they too different from the first book? Is this character development too fast?

And then other things like:

Did I introduce this character too quickly? Did I introduce them too slowly?

Do I do enough to build up this new character’s motivations in a real way?

Turns out, it’s quite…stressful if you let it be stressful. And for a little while, I did. I keep thinking that this book took me a long time to write, because I had to take pauses in between writing this book and editing THE IRON HEX (also also writing 20k of Project 🌘🗝️🏰🥀 because I literally couldn’t stop myself). But, when I actually think about it, I wrote this first draft in about six and a half months, which I think is pretty good.

Once I had jumped into the world of Astra again, I realized I had a LOT to do in this book. The second book can sometimes suffer from a sophomore slump, and I’ve been committed to not letting that happen, which means that this book is JAM packed with action and adventure and drama…it also means that I had to do a LOT of balancing.

I can’t say much about the plot because I’m not trying to spoil the first book, but this second instalment was a balance of growing my characters (sometimes for the worse) and developing new ones (I think you’re going to be OBSESSED with one person in particular), and that’s tough when you're also keeping a breakneck intense action-packed pace.

This is a first draft, so it obviously is going to go through an edit in the next three weeks before I send it over to my editor but for me, the hardest part of writing is getting the full story down. Once the edits are in progress, that always feels a little bit easier to me. We’ll see if that rings true this time too.

I TRULY think I stuck the landing, though. I’m very very pleased with the last 10k of the story and the way I wrapped it up. Earlier today, as I was writing the last chapter, I had one of those moments where the character told me what was needed for the final section of the book, and honestly? I think it just makes so much more sense than what I had originally planned.

All in all I am SO excited to be done this first draft! Celebrations all around!

Next up: Editing the first draft to send into my editor. Once I’m done with that, I’m going to be finishing the first draft of Project 🌘🗝️🏰🥀. I cannot wait for this, I have been CHOMPING at the bit to dive back into this new world I’ve been creating

THEN? Finalizing the outline for the third (and final!) Iron Hex book! I also need to finalize a title…haha…I wish I was kidding.

And THEN!?!?!!? THE IRON HEX RELEASES!!! AHHHH!!!

It’s going to be a busy year, and I cannot wait.

With love,
Vic