Ooh...a NEW manuscript!

Beginning of August, I decided to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. 18 days later, I had my 50k words. 3 days after that, I had a complete first draft.

The entire first half of 2011 I was working on the same manuscript, a manuscript that also took a good part of my writing energy and concentration in 2010. The dark fantasy manuscript that I've been writing all those letters to. Revising that has been at the forefront of my brain for SUCH a long time--and believe me, it was worth it. All that deleted and rewritten text was so worth it, because I really like how the manuscript turned out, and it surprised me so many times. (Don't get me wrong, it was frustrating as hell, too. But worth it frustration.)

But oh wow, I'd almost forgotten how fantastic it is to write a first draft, because the last first draft I wrote was in 2009 when I first wrote the dark fantasy project. Since then, I've REwritten two projects (one completely from scratch, which was kind of like doing a first draft), and I've done so much revising (I feel like a revision machine). New projects squished their way through the empty space in my brain and demanded to be written in as loud a voice as their unformed ideas could make, but the revisions always yelled louder, and so that's what I always did.

Until this project, this new manuscript, a YA fantasy, blew up into a monster sized idea with sub plots and side characters and world details and facets and pretty things. I actually wrote the first pages of it (going through EVERY SINGLE TENSE/POV combination (except 2nd person, cuz seriously...) until I settled on one) while I was doing the final read-through of the dark fantasy. In those final dark fantasy days, the YA fantasy would Not. Shut. Up.

I've had this idea for over a year. Maybe it was waiting so long to actually get to it (and I did have to keep myself from doing it so I could solidify a lot of points about the idea), but I don't know if I've ever had such fun writing a first draft, and that includes the first time waaaaay long ago when I realized I was going to actually FINISH a novel.

Part of what made it great was the same energy that made me want to keep revising the dark fantasy: they aren't just fantasy stories--yes, they're commercial plots and action fun and magic, but I also got to slip a little feminism and questioning binaries in there, too. In totally different ways than the feminism most people usually think of (like if you're thinking of burning bras or man hating, that's not what I mean at all.) I'm talking about worlds that never needed feminism because of their social structure, worlds that have other binaries or other -isms to worry about, worlds that never decided that a woman's biology makes her less useful or less of a person or just less.

This is my favorite part of writing.