Kris quit her job a couple weeks ago. She was constantly working and hasn’t really had a vacation in a long time, so she decided to take a month or two off before finding something new. In the meantime, she’s going to focus on her future writing career.

Due to this wonderful decision, she and I are able to have our writing dates at Barnes and Noble again. Starting this past Saturday, she and I are going to spend every Saturday morning at B&N for a few hours to write or edit or whatever we need to get done. This is great because I’m always so busy with homework and such that I can never guarantee myself that I will get writing done every day. Saturday will be like a catch-up day for me.

So, as we all know, I decided to outline Far Away this month so I could finish writing it for NaNoWriMo in November. Well, my laptop was dead because I forgot to charge it the night before, so I brought my hard copy of Take Over to B&N with me this past Saturday. Kris and I were there for at least three hours and I only got six pages done. Part of that was my getting distracted at nothing, but also because the first draft is a little bit… well, terrible.

On the first page, I rewrote two paragraphs and cut out the rest of the page.

The second page looked a little bit better, but again… it didn’t make much sense.

Needless to say, it took me a while to get through the first couple of pages.

Kris was proud because she said, “Look! You’re growing as a writer.”

You know that feeling you get when you finish writing something whether it be a full length novel, a short story, or even a poem? You get a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. You feel successful. It doesn’t matter whether it came out good or not, you completed something. Well, that’s how I felt when I finished writing this manuscript.

I wrote Take Over for Camp NaNoWriMo way back in April 2013. When I finished writing this novel (this was before I started writing Detective Florence), I thought to myself: This has got to be the best first draft I’ve ever written!

A year and a half later and I’m realizing just how wrong I was. I read the first sentence of the novel, turned to Kris with a look of disgust on my face and said, “I already don’t like this.”

I even considered re-writing Take Over for NaNo this year and let Far Away wait a little bit longer. However, it’s going to take me a while to re-read and edit through the first draft of Take Over, so I think I’m going to just stick with editing it for now. I’m most likely going to be re-writing it as I edit anyway. When NaNo is all said and done, I’ll worry about re-writing Take Over.

Out of all the pieces I’ve written between April 2013 and now… who knew I was actually learning along the way? It doesn’t feel like I’ve been learning, but I must be doing something right.