Ink, Paper and 75,625 of My Words

Man, it has been one roller coaster of a week. Some ups - all the awesome critiques on my query over at the Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment. Some downs - crazy shit happening at work. But, I am excited for the weekend because I'm finally ready to print out Noir for my first full read-through!

I finished the first draft of Noir on December 4th, and have been letting it have "marinating" time, so my eyes are fresh when I start making editing notes. I did a little work on it over the Christmas break, not editing but researching various things. I never do that during the first draft, but put an @ sign wherever I need to look something up so I can easily search later. And over the last couple weeks I've gone through and replaced all the @ signs with the appropriate stuff, including changing the end slightly because I'd written something inaccurate about Mt. Rainier that was fairly vital.

So, now I'm done, and that baby's ready to see it's first printing! Tomorrow I'm headed to Office Depot and then on Saturday night I'm going to try to read it straight through. I'll only look at big picture issues on this first round (plot, flow, character consistency, areas that need cutting/plumping). I'm super excited!

What are your plans, my friends? Writing or otherwise... I'd love to hear from you!