I puttered around yesterday, doing the traditional New Year’s spice cupboard tidying up and a few other things. I realized after everything was put back into the shelves that I was, well, procrastinating. Me? Really?

What was I putting off? The very thing I had been so anxiously looking forward to. Cracking the seal on the printed copy of my NaNoWriMo first draft. What was up with that?

So when the last possible dish had been washed – yeah that’s how serious the procrastination was – I fixed myself a quick dinner and marched myself upstairs with the folder under my arm. I sat down in my sewing room and took it out and started reading.

The first few paragraphs were so familiar! I read on. And on. I reached a point a number of pages in where the story had started moving away from my original scrap of an idea and towards what the plot had become. I knew that the very beginning was going to need a lot of attention and then there would be fixing along the way until the beginning characters matched what they’d turned into. Of course what the main characters are isn’t revealed right away regardless, but they had to be ready.

I kept going. Was I reading too fast? I tried to slow down and imagine myself a first-time reader. I tried to remember the advice read in several places: “kill your darlings.” Oh dear. Problem was that I really was enjoying what I read. I tried to be more objective.

Reading on, I got to the first turning point and went on. At the second big moment, the male character chooses a new life. Part two begins.

Many hours later I was done having been surprised by the ending scenes. I’d done some laughing. I cried at the end. I cried earlier than I had when I’d written it. These tears didn’t seem to have as much to do with what the characters had done but with coming to the end of this story. This story I’d written.

This afternoon I sat down and took a stab at writing a new beginning for the story. It went pretty smoothly, especially after finding a reasonable name for the now-named doctor who sends the main character out for a regimen of walking. I had a thought as to how to tie him back into the story that made me smile. Actually that thought came first and then the name. I’m sure someone will say – how trite is that? Oh well.

Then I read back through the story but on the computer, making some changes and corrections. I referred to the paper copy and flipped through from time to time to make the changes I’d noted in the margins. Mostly tense or punctuation changes and a few word changes. I put in the almost throw away link to the doctor at the end.

I added about 850 words to the thing total and saved the whole thing as Draft 2. Onward!