No, not a soft drink. I'm talking about what you do when you finish the first draft of a manuscript. I've just completed an 80,000 word suspense/thriller I named Win or Go Home. I started writing it 13 months ago, finished a first draft during the early part of the winter but scrapped the second half when I began to revise it. So technically I am on draft one and a half. I've been bringing chapters to my critique group and getting some great feedback so far.
My plan now is to let the manuscript lie for a few weeks, maybe a whole month. It is, after all, almost November which is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I highly recommend it to nouveau novelists, if only for the discipline of trying to write something every day for a month. The goal of participants is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, which works out to about 1600 words a day. I think I'll get started on the sequel to Win or Go Home during NaNoWriMo. After all, if I get lucky with an agent and luckier with a publisher, they're going to ask if I have another book in the series. To which I'll answer: but of course!
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