Yay! I have officially finished the first draft of my manuscript!

I am so happy to be able to say I am finished! Kind of. In some ways, this is only the beginning of a long and winding road to getting published. But, I'll take my joy when and where I can get it. The first draft of my story is complete. Now the real writing begins. It is often said that the real writing comes in the rewrite, in the revision process. How true that is.

I now have to go through my manuscript with a fine tooth comb, deciding what works and more importantly, what doesn't. Working on my query letter actually changed the focus of my story. For those of you who are not familiar with the query, it's a letter that you formulate that succinctly tells a literary agent what your story is about. The goal is to make your story interesting and enticing enough that an agent will desire to read pages of your manuscript. The hope is the agent will like the story enough to offer the writer representation and try to get the story sold to a publisher.

There is a chapter I really like, but no longer truly fits the trajectory of where the story is now headed. I have to remove that chapter and anything else that slows things down. It's not as easy as it sounds. Writers really fall in love with things they've written and are loath to let them go, but go they must if they no longer fit.

These are the type of things I have to do now along with looking for general mistakes, typos, etc. I'm going to let the story sit for a while to "breathe" and come back to it. I need time away from it, so I can look at it with fresh eyes. You would be surprised at how different it looks and how many things you catch when you give the story and yourself some time apart.

Toodles!