First Draft is Complete!

Woo hoo! At about 2:00 this afternoon, I finished the first draft of the Norton The Third manuscript.

The main body of the novel is about 330 pages, or 161,000 words.

My plan is now to spend the rest of the month of February doing my own editing; I promised my kids that I would have the manuscript clean enough by the beginning of March that I would be willing to self-publish it at that point.

The material is in a shape that could be described as "interesting". I wrote it roughly in the order it will be read, in two main bursts of effort. The first was directly after September 11, 2001, when my customers in the brokerage industry were distracted by the massive repair job on their infrastructure. I was effectively unemployed for a year or so then, and spent a lot of time on Norton The Third. When things picked up again, I went back to my "day job", with about half of the material complete.

But, over the fifteen years between then and now, I have picked up the work and pawed through it, cleaning up this and that, on vacations, airplane trips, and so on. I didn't add anything new, but read the stuff several times and took out a lot of typeos and awkward phrases. Thus, the first half of it could be considered to be an edited draft.

I didn't do much else on the novel until November, 2016, when -- wait for it -- I got laid off from my job, and decided to retire. Since then, N3 has been my main project. I have just now finished the other half, and this stuff is pretty raw. I'll spend most of my time through the end of the month getting the two halves into consistent quality.