A big milestone for me today – I have submitted the draft of novel number three, the progress of which many years of you have been following on this blog. It’s a strange feeling, because on the one hand, it’s immensely satisfying to have juggled and plotted the lives of a number of characters and reached a point where I have a completed story. But on the other, I know that this is only a milestone; it’s by no means the end of the journey.

I’m looking forward to receiving feedback from my agent and editor, both of whom have immense skill and insight when it comes to the finer points of storytelling. I am of course very nervous, too. I want them to love it – I want everyone to love it! I don’t mean I want them to say it’s perfect, because it won’t be – beginner writers take note: by the time you take a novel off the shelves in a bookshop, it will have been redrafted more times than you can begin to imagine. But I’m just hoping that they’ll share my passion for these characters and what happens to them, even if I have to rewrite, rethink and re-order whole chunks of the text.

So, what has the process of getting this manuscript ready for submission involved in the last couple of weeks? Well, it’s amazing how you can think you’ve done all you can and then find SOOOO much more to do! You may remember I made myself a novel “to do” list, which initially had about 65 things on it. It was wonderful to cross off several of those items each day, but I think the number probably doubled. They varied from bigger things like, ‘write an epilogue’ to smaller technical things, such as: ‘show character getting dressed’ (I noticed that the character was naked in one paragraph, and then he was opening the door and stepping outside – he wasn’t meant to still be in the buff!)

Then, when I thought I’d done all the ‘story’ things, I read it through again looking for typos, punctuation errors, extra spaces etc – it seemed like there were millions. Then I read it through again, and found a million more.

I’d written most of this draft in Scrivener, so I then had to compile it as a word document, which was really easy, except that Scrivener refused to accept that my prologue wasn’t chapter 1 (even though I put it in a separate folder. Anyone??) Anyway, I ended up having to manually change the chapter numbers – all 50-odd of them! And then I realised I still hadn’t written the sodding epilogue. It may be that the epilogue isn’t needed, but I thought I needed to know what happened to the characters after the ‘ending’, so I sat in my favourite coffee shop and bashed out an epilogue of sorts. That will be the most first-draft-y bit of the whole thing!

It’s been a lot of hard work, and I know there will be a lot more hard work to come, but I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to hit ‘send’ earlier this afternoon (despite sitting here looking at the screen for a few minutes before plucking up the courage to actually make that click!)

And so now I’m going to have a break for a few days, catch up on some reading, and maybe even let my thoughts roam over a few ideas for novel number four. The immediate plan, though, is to sit and drink a glass of bubbly in celebration. There’s still a long way to go, but at least I’ve reached this significant point in the process. Hubby is having a glass, too – after listening for hours on end to me moaning about how difficult it all is, he deserves it!

Things may go a little quiet on the blog now for a while, but I’ll still be blogging about the writing life at least every three or four weeks. In the meantime, cheers!

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