I may have written the complete text in a month, but it'll take me the rest of the year to edit it into something palatable for another human being to digest. But that's the point of the first draft: just get it onto the page and worry about it later.
What started out as a little over fifty-thousand words has dwindled down to just under forty-thousand. Where did my ten-thousand words go?? Apparently, some fluff got into my text, but I'm sure those ten-thousand will be back as I'm fleshing out stuff like "They all looked afraid" into something a bit more literary. I really can't wait to have some people read it, but it'll probably be a while before it's dressed enough to go out in public.
As I work on my project and do other things, it's so easy for me to liken novel writing to normal every-day things. Like cooking, for example. When I want to make something, I get out the recipe (the outline), drag all the ingredients out of the fridge (the initial scenes). Then, I get rid of the stuff I don't need (plastic bags, inedible greens -- editing). I measure, mix, arrange (polish), and cook. When the finished food product comes out of the oven, it looks nothing like the scattered ingredients on my counter, but those bags and bottles and smatterings of flour were necessary for the finished product.
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