I finally finished outlining the second draft. Like I’ve said previously, I’m working in reverse in a very strange way.

I finished the second draft in December, but still there are many changes to be made. I want to go into the third draft with a very clear idea of what I need to write. So I outlined the second draft so I can see the entire story at a glance. It’s a 15-page outline for a story that’s almost 300 pages.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad as far as outlines go.

Now that that’s finished, I’m going to modify that outline hopefully tomorrow. The modified version will become my outline for the third draft of the novel. I’m very, very excited to be writing with an outline. I ran into so many hurdles during the first and second draft – one being that there were times I simply had no idea what should happen next. This led to the first draft being almost completely unworkable; I cut more than half of it.

I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself to get the third draft done as soon as possible. I didn’t write nearly enough in 2016. I had a month off between jobs in April/early May. I didn’t write at all. I barely wrote the entire summer, either, as I felt hollowed out and disconnected with writing. Really, I didn’t make an effort to finish the second draft until November – eleven fucking months into the year. And even then I didn’t finish until mid December.

I also told my therapist to ask me about how much writing I did since we last met at the start of all our sessions (I feel guilty telling her I did nothing).

In the most ideal universe, I’ll have the third draft done in late February/early March. The third draft will (hopefully!) be ready for beta readers. After they’re through reading, I will incorporate their feedback into a fourth draft. I really, really want to have a manuscript that’s ready to query agents with by sometime in the fall.