During the last week in May, just before my birthday, I finished the First Draft of The Woman in the Lake. My ‘first draft” is a little different from most writers because I cycle through it and revise the story at the same time.

 

Essentially, it’s a plot hole free draft. When I introduce something new into the story. I immediately go back and layer it into the previous scenes. For instance, if I introduce a gun as a murder weapon at the midpoint, I go back and foreshadow it at the beginning. I do the same thing when I discover the whodunit. Instead of writing the next scene, I will go back and subtly layer character motivations and clues for the reader to find.

 

Back to the good news.

 

At the end of May, just before my birthday, the word count was 99,795 words. So, it’s a novel. Just like, The Locked Room and Duplicity, it’s a character-driven mystery and will be the second book in the Rookie Reporter series which follows James’s first year as a journalist at the Northampton Tribune.

 

Since that the end of May, I’ve been doing a self-line edit where I’m going through my story and editing out redundant phrasing and rewriting character actions that I tend to overuse. As of today, I’ve reached chapter 50 out of 61 and the word count is now 98,323.

 

I’m almost done, I’m three chapters into the final act of the story. Yay!