I'm done the first draft of my romance novel, The Duke of Snow and Apples! AHAHAHA! And in under three months (I started this for NaNoWriMo), WITH a full-time job, which doesn't seem too shabby for a first draft, eh?
Now comes the hard, er, easier, er, different part: historical research. My novel doesn't take place in Regency England per se, but rather a fantasy world that is modelled and based on Regency England, so I want to know the stuff. I didn't do the research before I started writing because the fear of getting something wrong was paralysing me and keeping me from writing the story I had in my head and that's just dumb. So I wrote my story with surface knowledge I gleaned from reading other Regency novels and one history book (What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew), and I'll fix it up and rewrite it in my second and third drafts.
Right now, it would never be published. A lot of it is spoonfed exposition, gibberish, wrong words, mispelled words, made-up words that sound like the right words, etc. But, unlike my only other finished novel (The Shining Empress), I actually think I can make this into a good, readable, publishable novel. I finished The Shining Empress after a year and a half of writing it during classes I should have been paying attention to (but I got good grades in anyway, nyaa nyaa), and I finished it to say that I finished it and then tucked it away and gave up on it.
Not The Duke of Snow and Apples. I got plans for this baby. Wish me luck!
Congratulations on the milestone; and now, for the millstone! Best wishes on your editing - the concept sounds interesting (I'm a sucker for cross-genre) and I like the catchy title.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations! Good luck with editing and I hope that you'll get published. The title is really interesting, by the way.
ReplyDeleteCongrats on finishing, and good luck with all the rest!
ReplyDeleteGreat Job! Writing a novel in less than three months shows such dedication.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with the research. It actually sounds like fun but I like research. lol
Nicolas and Antonia: thanks! I really like the title, and I feel it really fits in with how the story turns out and the symbolism I put in.
ReplyDeleteLaura: Thanks! I'm going to need all the luck I can get!
Leslie: Right now I'm doing surface research - that is, reading general books on the Regency (right now, "An Elegant Madness") and taking notes on the bibliographies when I want to study something specifically. For this book, because my hero is a servant, I'm going to doing a lot of research into the servant class in the Regency period.