The hardest part is over, hurray for my dragons!

I've been a very bad dragon keeper and haven't updated this blog since last week, I know.  But I have some exciting news: with the help of my dragons, I'm finally done re-writing the end of my novel!  I had to do some serious revamping to change my story  from a one novel story to a three novels arch, and until now I had never been truly happy with the results.  Well, these times are over, the first installment of my dragons' adventures is now officially closed!  We went out on Friday with Dave and celebrated the event, as it was truly a relief for me to come up with a good ending to this volume.

I am giving myself a couple of days away from it before I start rewrite session Number 2, I tend to work better when my eyes are "new" again.  And then the never ending process of tweaking and correcting and rewriting and cutting and rewriting again is going to continue of course... I estimate I'm about 3 or 4 rewrites away from being ready to send the novel out--as you can see, I'm far from being done yet.  I also have to trim down at least 10'000 words to bring it down to 100'000 words, which is the limit to send out a first novel to an editor.  I haven't quite decided if I'm going to do the cutting down myself or hire a book doctor to do so, but I'll think of that when I'm done with the next few rewrites.

Don't tell anyone, and particularly not my dragons, but I'm already thinking about the first sequel and I have to force myself to stay away from it until I'm done with the first book.  I know that if I let myself go and seriously start on the sequel, the original manuscript will never be done.  I do however, furiously and scrupulously write down all the ideas and plot tweaks that come to my mind for the sequel, to come back to it on a later date.

So there, you have it! The current rewrite is going to take a little time, I suspect about a month, for I have to start thinking about those cuts and might need to do some rewriting for it to be seamless, but  that part shouldn't be difficult, just tedious.  I will try to keep you updated on the progress my dragons and I are making a couple of times a week.