The First Draft Is Here... Now Comes The Hard Part

It's finally here. The first draft of my new novel, Coming of Age. The novel that took about three weeks to finish... after three years hiatus. I first started this novel back in the summer of 2013. I had just finished binge-watching Orange is The New Black back then, and I suddenly had this hankering to write. Not about women's prison, mind you, but about three people trying to navigate life and adulthood in New York City. It was just a simple idea, and like many of my simple ideas, it ended up stalling after I had a bad case of writer's block.

Then in March this year, I bought a new laptop and I had to move all my documents and files from my old one (affectionally named Thomas after the gay under-butler in Downton Abbey) to my new one (lovingly called Kimmy after the title character in Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). It was when I was organizing all my documents and files that I found the novel that I had started back in 2013 and abandoned. I read it again and I fell in love with the characters again, so I decided to bring it to life. I didn't think I would be able to, after all, it had stalled for three years, but for some reason the words kept flowing and in three weeks, I finished my first draft.

As great as it is to finally finish writing a novel, though, the first draft is really nothing to brag about. It's still far from perfect. I still need to do a lot of work to polish it, edit it, rewrite it and turn it into a novel I would want to read. And so now, here comes the hard part. Editing. Ugh. It's a brutal process, and requires a lot of patience and commitment, two things I'm not exactly in an abundance of. But I keep going back to my characters, and how much I love them and how much I want to tell their story. And so, here I am - committing to the brutal work of editing and rewriting. It's not as much fun as the initial writing of the novel, but I have to keep going.

I owe it to my characters to make it good.

I owe it to myself to make it good.

And soon -- very soon, I hope -- you will finally have this novel in your hands. I hope when that day comes, you will love these characters and their story as much as I do.

Keep watching this space.