I finished the first draft of my novel

Your standard winged bulls charging across a grid that may be a chessboard or may represent that reality is constructed.

I’ve been working on a novel since 2002, writing an installment every November through National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, which I usually capitalize as “Nanowrimo” because I think it looks dumb the other way).

In October 2022, I retired from the tech industry, spent some time figuring out what it meant to be on my own schedule with my own goals, and in June 2024, I finished the first draft.

This is a perfectly normal way to compute your word count, and every symbol in this screenshot makes perfect sense.

446370 words of shitty but also awesome first draft.

And I celebrated.

Half of how I kept myself going through this very long, very hairy story was with the promise that it was OK if I wrote garbage because I could fix it in the second draft.

That sounds like the moral equivalent of maxing out multiple credit cards to fund a startup, but as far as I can tell from my surveys, it’s an almost universal plan among first time novelists. (Some, but not all, more experienced novelists become better at structuring or outlining the novel before starting, which saves them revision pain.)

I mentioned to my special lady friend that I would like to print it out as a keepsake, but it would take me several months to print it out at the library given their free page allowance, and really the responsible thing to do would be to buy a new printer with the expectation that this was the first and last thing it would ever do, because an entry level printer isn’t going to last more than a few thousand pages anyway, certainly not without several toner refills.

She put a hand on my shoulder and said: “Go to the print shop across the street. I used to work at one. They’re unbelievably bored all the time. Tell them what you want to do and you’ll make their day.”

The guy at the print shop was excited to discuss the options. They had these nice ring bindings which would allow the pages to lie flat as you reread with a red pen.

“How many pages can you fit in a binding?” I said.

“Oh, a lot,” he said. He went in the back and looked at inventory and the specs. “250 pieces of paper per binding.”

250 pieces of paper (“leaves”); 500 double-sided pages.

I went home and started looking at my rendering system. Like all normal people, I write my novels in a plain text format similar to, but needlessly different from, Markdown, and I have home-grown software to convert it into a generic interchange format, which I can then transform into HTML, LaTeX, or any other format I feel like writing the code for.

I banged on my ridiculous document management software with a wrench for a while until I got it to spit out a pretty good-looking novel, with an appropriate type face, in an appropriate size, with appropriate margins and part and chapter and section headings.

It was 1290 pages, including a 20 page table of contents (which strikes me as necessary in a 1290 page text).

I looked at the titles and page numbers of the parts (the largest subdivisions of the document) until I found the right places to cut the book in three, such that each volume would be under 500 pages, or 250 pieces of paper, and fit into a single binding. Apparently I’d written a trilogy without knowing it.

Per-volume key terms. The chemical diagrams are an unrelated, pre-existing feature of the whiteboard.

My special lady friend and I then did a word cloud exercise where she got up in front of the whiteboard and I gave her key terms from the part, chapter, and section headings from each part, and then we fed that into an AI art generator (Gemini, not out of loyalty, but because it was the first one whose name we remembered that was still free), and came up with some art that I personally like. It does a good job of capturing the feeling.

(To be clear, when the time does come to publish this commercially, I’ll show them to a human artist and say “Here’s what the dumb jerk robot came up with. Treat this like it’s my stick figure mockups of what I was thinking and use your actual human art skills and blow me away. You know, for money.” Which I feel I need to mention because in a lot of the online communities I’m in, people are reaching Earthers-in-Isaac-Asimov’s-Robot-Series level of hateful towards AI art, threatening to kill its users on sight for taking human jobs.)

I carefully set up one PDF for each of the three volumes, with a cover based on the AI art as the first page of each, and the print shop came through.

The three bound volumes, in a view showing their covers. “Revision 864” is, as many of my colleagues recognized, an indicator that I use an archaic software tool called Apache Subversion.

The result was three giant volumes, weighing more than three kilograms (more than six and a half pounds) and almost three inches (seven centimeters). Which feels good.

Yeah, I live in America. My measuring tape is not in metric.

So what’s next?

I have done a bunch of reading for recommendations on how to revise. Almost everyone recommends setting the book aside for at least a month before rereading, so you’ll be coming back to it with a fresh eye. I’m not sure that’s going to be possible for me given how long I’ve been with this story, but some distance will help.

Everyone generally agrees you’re going to spend a lot of energy in the rewrite, and you need to go in with a strategy, because it’s intense and can be demotivating.

After that, go through in a triage mode, focusing on larger scale changes before smaller scale: e.g. fix theme and plot arcs and character arcs before you make every scene pop, and make every scene pop before you make every sentence sharp and pretty, because some of those scenes and sentences aren’t going to exist after you do those larger scale edits.

Today, my strategy looks like this:

1. Do any research I’ve been putting off:
   Reread Plato’s Republic and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
   Learn more about the lifecycles of rats.
   Is the constructed language doing everything I want it to?
   etc.
2. Reread, filling out a notes doc with things I notice:
   - Phrases I love: gotta call out the little things that make me happy.
   - Thoughts: is there some big idea I didn’t realize I was working through? Can I explore it more thoroughly?
   - Plot Holes: oh, there are so many, because I changed my mind about where I was going or because I lost interest in something or because I just forgot what I’d written 22 years before.
   - Decisions Not Made: is this dialog weird because I was shying away from a decision about whether the character had an abusive childhood? Is the parliament of the secret world government unicameral or bicameral? It doesn’t all have to be on the page, but if it has some impact on the story, I have to know the answer.
   - Inconsistencies: they probably bug me more than they do most people, but I want people who are like me to enjoy this story.
   - Simple Edits: some things cost nothing to fix.
3. Begin hypertextification of Story Bible.
   I have a big text doc with facts about the timeline, settings, technology, character histories, etc. I want to turn it into a hypertext directory of Markdown files in Obsidian so it’s easier to navigate while expanding it with all the detail I now know and have to keep straight.
4. Write a reverse outline.
5. Identify major changes needed:
   4a. Plot arc changes
   4b. Character arc changes
   4c. If this is a trilogy, what are boundaries of the three stories?
6. Sort changes from most to least intrusive, and implement them in that order.
7. Do a scene-level edit.
8. Do a line-level edit.

Will that strategy survive the actual revision process? I’ll keep you updated. I don’t know how long this is going to take, but I promise it will not take another 23 years.