The Reaping: The First Draft

I finished the first draft today. 68,000 words. This was a monumental task for me. I've never found a draft to be so hard to get out. Which means working on the second draft won't be a piece of cake, either, but I'm excited to get into it and see how I can make Terra's story better.

Going into the sequel, I thought, "Oh, how hard can a sequel be?" New flash...very hard! I was under the misunderstanding that having characters in place and knowing how I wanted the story to develop would make this a cinch. Nope. Anything but. I've never worked so hard for a story in my life.

The first half was really hard to write. The second started flowing a lot easier and went pretty fast. So I'm betting the first half will need quite a bit of work. So as I read through this first draft, I'll be interested to see how many times I'll tell myself, "What were you thinking?!"

So hopefully the second draft won't be quite as arduous as the first, but I'm planning on quite a bit of work for it.

After the second draft, then I'll send it to my beta readers and see how many times they also say "What were you thinking?!" That's the beauty of beta readers. They tell it to you straight (if you have good beta readers) and make the story infinitely better than you could on your own.

LDS Authors Giveaway Hop: Winners Announced

Thanks to The Book Bug and I Am a Reader, Not a Writer for hosting. Check out the linky below the rafflecopter form for the list of other blogs participating. There are some great blogs and great prizes. But the greatest prize of all?

Enter to win a signed paperback (US only) or an ebook (Int) of Bound.

Good News

Bound has shipped to all the other ebook retailers Smashwords distributes to (Apple iBookstore, B&N, Diesel, Kobo, etc.) so if you've been waiting for it to reach those shelves, be on the lookout. It usually takes these retailers a week or two to get the data up, so it should be any day now!

In the meantime, The Reaping update: I've written over 50,000 words. If that doesn't have a lot of context for you (like my husband said, "I don't know what that means"), The Burn was about 61,000 words. The Reaping is definitely going to be longer. As I'm growing as a writer, I'm developing a better sense of what needs to be developed more and what needs to be cut. The Reaping definitely has a fuller story, and I'm not even done with the first draft yet! There are exciting things still to come for Terra.