When I finished chapter 35 of my first novel this week, I fell shy of hitting the magic 90,000 words / 500 pages mark.  (My chapters have gotten shorter since I switched from writing in longhand to using a typewriter.)  Ten months after I started writing the rough draft, I still have 200 pages to write over the next two months before I'm done.  A long journey to get this far with the end now in sight.

What will happen after the rough draft is done?  Nothing.

I will forget everything about my first novel by hiding the reading copy (double spaced pages printed on orange paper to discourage editing with a red pen), taking down the sticky notes from the brainstorming board, and working on other projects for three months.  When that time passes, I will spend a month evaluating the rough draft, going through all the notebooks, and putting together a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline.  Then spend the next four months creating the first draft from scratch, take a one month break, and spend another four months polishing the second draft.  I should have a finished manuscript to shop around in Summer 2010.

I'm looking forward to the three month break.  I have a finished vampire novella that I spent two years working on that need to be polished for publication.  When that's done, I can drop the novella into my short story collection to shop around.  Still got two dozen short stories I'm flogging around in a cruel world of rejection slips.   I'll be outlining my second novel that will be written while editing my first novel.

When I started out three years ago to get serious about being a writer, I thought things would get easier after a while.  Kinda like the Sprint commercial that's being shown at the movie theaters where a writer gets a call from his agent that a deal went through, Hollywood producers transforming his story into something else, and he's giving approval while holding hands with his girlfriend in a car dealership.  Although that commercial is about how one phone call can ruin a good thing, I get ticked off since my writing life is nothing like that.

I'm still waiting for the girlfriend and car dealership thing to happen.