Fourth draft complete
There were times when I expected I wouldn’t be able to write this message, that I’d get to tout the progress I made, but fall short of the goal. But then, in the past few days, something happened… the work permeated. I didn’t want to read as much, swim as much, or do anything as much as I wanted to live in the world of my novel.
So, I’m happy to report that, tonight, I finished the fourth draft.
Since I love caveats, I will point out that there’s still another day of work to do on the book, since the usual pattern each day is to review the work done the previous day and then start into the next portion. So, tomorrow, I will read what I did today, tweak it a bit, but then, when I finish that, there is no next portion to start.
It’s a strange elation to be at this point. And, to be fair, it seems hard to believe.
The reason I’m in Thailand is to be out of my element, to not have routine, or a common language, so that I can break through useless rules that have built up when I’m in a more familiar setting. That has certainly been the case.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been living in three alternating worlds. One is Thailand itself, and just sorting out getting supplies, cooking, eating out, and swimming. The second is the world of my novel. And the third is the alternating world of the different novels I read while I was here (see previous post for capsule reviews of those).
As none of the three worlds is my usual setting, it is still surreal to finish the fourth draft. It’s sort of like when I would work on my novel at 4 a.m. back when I was unemployed the last time. I would wake up in the middle of the night, and work on the book, then after 2 hours or so, I’d go back to bed. When I woke up, my first thought was that I needed to work on the book, only to remember that, no, I already had.
That’s how I feel now, without any sort of grounding, it still feels like ‘Did I really finish it?!’ I mean, I rarely know what day of the week it is. I tell time by the sun most of the time (the sun hits the pool at 9 a.m., I can work on the porch until 2 p.m., then the sun hits me, the sun goes down around 6 or so). And, aside from that, I have no routine here. So, it could be any time day or night on any day of the week, and I just shrug and work. If I wasn’t working on my book, I’d be reading novels in 100-page-in-one-sitting chunks. Many times, I would work on the book, cross-legged on the bed, and when I went to get up, my legs were all tight like I’d been sitting here for hours, which as far as I know I was. Time is amazingly shapeless here, hours can be fast or slow, and you just sort of chill out and watch how it all changes.
And everything was so easy. Like, today, knowing there was a good chance I’d finish the draft, I would be in the middle of an exciting chapter and my mind would think it’d be nice to go swimming. So, mid-chapter, I’d just go swimming for a half hour, come back, and pick right up without even scrolling back a paragraph. I just hit pause, went away, came back, and went right back into what I was doing, as I was in mid-edit. So, I was definitely in ‘the zone’ as they say.
Of course, I am naturally skeptical of things being easy, so I will not print this draft up for others to read until I can give it another scan once I’m back in America and out of my schedule-free, tropical utopia.
The good news is that I still really like the book. I think all of the improvements of this draft make the book are much tighter, solid read. The fourth draft started with 98,741 words and is now down to 86,705, I’m not sure if that’s it’s final fighting weight, but it is much leaner and flows better now. And, unlike last time, it actually has the right ending on it now.
And, the upside is that I actually have a week in Thailand now to be something new: an actual tourist. It’s time to take the working out of working vacation.
