Earlier this week I finished my rough draft of Whispers. And there was much rejoicing.

The draft topped out at just over 60,000 words. Funny how it took me a month to write 50,000 words, and nine months to write the other 10,000. But, that’s the magic of Nanowrimo.

It’s been a long time since I finished a rough draft. Well, I rough draft I was somewhat happy with, that is. For Nanowrimo 2009, I wrote an entire draft of Falling in Love with the Wind, but I was never really happy with that story. That’s a topic for another day, but basically even months after “finishing” it, I still wasn’t sure what the story was really about. I recently had an epiphany about that, but again, that’s a whole other story.

So the last first draft I really finished was for Nanowrimo 2007. That was also the first year I actually “won” Nanowrimo (read: made it to 50,000 words within the month). That story was Special Blend, and I thought it was done. Not perfect, not without need of editing, but done. How very wrong I was.

Now that Whispers is through it’s first stage, I’m bringing Special Blend back. It needs a lot of work. If you follow me on twitter, you’re gonna see me doing a lot of #writingpartys where I’m just outlining. Since I’ve already written the story once, I mostly know what’s going to happen, so I’m trying to outline it before I really delve into rewriting it. For those of you who are curious, I’m using the Snowflake Method. I’ll talk more about that in a later post, but so far it’s been very helpful. In a few months I’ll get to do this with Whispers, and I’m really excited for that.

Special Blend, which I’m currently just calling “Blake and Logan” until I come up with a title that actually fits, is about two college students making a bunch of mistakes and falling in love. When I wrote it originally, they were a few years older then me. Now they’re a few years younger. I’m not sure how I’ll go about writing it once I’m done with the outline (I may start from scratch, or I may drag out the old draft and see if anything is salvagable), but I’m really enjoying the revision process so far. I’m never really carried a story from first draft to second draft, but this story is a great place go start. It’s really the story I’ve thought most about, and it’s undergone the most changes.

This post was supposed to be about Whispers, but I guess I’ll save that for next time.