Finished the First Draft!

I finished the first draft of The Case of the Lost Werepuppy on Monday. It was an odd experience. I knew I was getting close. When I finished my writing last Saturday, I knew I had just a few more scenes left. I needed to do some wrap up after the climactic battle, and Dafydd had some soul-searching to do. Several people had just died for his fight, and that's never an easy moment for a character.

I sat down on Monday (having seen X-Men First Class on Saturday), and I knew the scene was going to have some of the feel of the Charles/Erik scene in the library (except both Paul and Dafydd were drinking Scotch--no wine for Paul in my scene--and the chessboard was absent.) Ehm. I digress. Think I enjoyed the movie?

Anyway, that dialogue scene turned out to have a couple of surprises for me. I'd been mentally roughing out the scene the night before, and I knew I wanted Paul to finally reveal how old he was. When I was writing on Monday, I literally typed, "I was born in..." and then pulled out my notes. Remember, Paul is based on an historical character, and I had his actual birthday.

That was when I got my shock. Paul's date of birth was September 10. The scene I was writing took place on September 9. Remember my post of last week on resources? The date of the story was driven by full moon phases, and I hadn't remembered Paul's date of birth. It was one of those things I cut and paste into Evernote to refer to later.

It's funny how things work that way. Kind of like it was meant to be, huh?

My other surprise came when I finished the scene. I was done. I mean really done. I'd wrapped up the theme and the story in that scene. I needed a couple of paragraphs to resolve one last plot point, but I decided it could all happen off-screen. It didn't need to be shown.

So I was done. And I'm very glad these guys are in a series. You know the feeling you get when you finish a really good book? One of those you never want to end? Finishing this one felt exactly like that. I'm hoping that means it will be as good for my readers as it was for me.

But it's not really done. It still needs editing. I kind of figured out my themes as I went along, and now I need to go back and strengthen them. Plus fix inconsistencies, crappy wording and make my fight scenes obey me. I hate writing fight scenes. Good thing I can rewrite them passably.

Oh, and just because I could, I started working on the next book yesterday. I do my best writing in the morning. Editing I can do anytime. Might as well use my time wisely.

One final link to X-Men. Want to see what Paul looks like in my head? 

It was kind of eerie watching the movie. This was pretty much exactly how Paul has looked to me. Even down to the slight head tilt. And Fassbender is almost exactly the same height and has the same color eyes as the historical Paul. In real life, Fassbender's hair is lighter than Paul's, but in this role, even that is right. Eerie.