Whoo hooo! The first draft, she is done!

Yippeee! Tonight, I can watch TV without tremendous guilt!! I've finished the first draft! (Note I have not been desperate enough to give up my TV entirely. I've just been watching with a lot of guilt while also folding laundry in a feeble attempt to lessen said guilt.) I was aiming for the end of this week, so...I'm ahead of my schedule!!

I'm not one of those writers who can say, "Only fifty more pages to go and then I'm done," because I do multiple drafts. For instance, although this is the first time I've actually gotten to the Epilogue, the directory is HERS TO DESIRE 3.0. Nor does this mean I've only done three drafts of up until Chapter 17 (at present there are 24 chapters; this will surely change). I have edited/revised each chapter at least once more. This means this is the most recent edited version. I have a hard copy of up until Chapter Ten with all sorts of changes in purple ink (so I didn't get mixed up with 2.0.) I've just printed up Chapters 11 - Epilogue. Now I'll start again at the beginning, with my purple pen, no doubt making more changes to those first chapters (although I sure hope not many), and go right through to the end. Then I'll copy the chapters to a new directory called HERS TO DESIRE 4.0. I'll input the purple ink changes and make another hard copy. Hopefully this will be the final printout, and I'll go through the whole ms. one more time. Then I'll make HERS TO DESIRE 5.0, and this should (oh, please, oh, please!) be the final version.

So I've got a ways to go yet, but I'm ahead of schedule and I'm hoping the first 14 chapters or so are relatively finished.

In other news, Luis (the more slender and whiter of the two kitties) is fascinated by the printer. He puts his front paws on it and watches the paper.

While I was printing up the ol' manuscript, I did some yard work. I raked leaves and then decided to put down some of the ivy growing on the brick. That was quite the work-out and it's not often I'm out in a T-shirt in November. But the sun was shining, it needed to be done and have I mentioned I finished the first draft?