A Wounded Heart – First Draft Complete!
So, having made the decision that AWH wouldn’t be the final book in Paul’s story, I expected to be able to bring this volume to a conclusion—I’ll leave it to others to eventually decide if it’s a satisfying conclusion—within a couple of chapters and maybe ten to twenty thousand words.
That was when the manuscript was at 80,000 words. It’s now at 104,000 and I could easily write another ten or twenty thousand words on top of this to get to my “end point” I envisaged.
But I haven’t done that. In fact, I’ve even gone so far as to have Paul acknowledge in his narration that he could describe the events that bring this chapter of his story to a close in a lot of detail (even quite graphic detail) but is choosing not to.
I was initially worried that doing this may make the book’s ending seem rushed, but I think I’ve managed to do it in a way that feels okay. If I had tried to describe the scenes that Paul glosses over in his narration, they could have seemed repetitive and superfluous, since they would have been almost completely sex scenes anyway.
I’ve written before, in 2015 and 2009, about having too much sex in a sex story—in particular in longer novels—and I’ve always tried to make sure that I‘m not writing sex scenes for the sake of having sex scenes. They do, I think, have to have a point—be that either moving the plot along or doing some character development.
I hope that’s what I’ve achieved here.
There was an interesting discussion of this recently in the StoriesOnline Forums.
This book ends at a natural break point in Paul’s story, which is what I intended when I decided not to make this the final book in the series. Paul’s closing narration is reflective and that reflection, I hope, brings the novel together as a single piece, and sets up what’s to come in the future.
Of course, I’m the author, so it’s not really for me to say if what I’ve produced is successfully achieving my aims. It’s for you, the reader, to decide.
So what now? Well, over the Christmas break I’ll re-read what I’ve written—probably on a tablet rather than a laptop or PC—and perhaps make a few notes, correct some obvious errors and see try and work out if it all hangs together or if I need to make some changes.
I’ll also be looking for some volunteers to have a read of this first draft and offer their comments on the plot & characterisation. Then in the New Year, I’ll set about doing a more thorough edit and preparing the book for release. Ideally, I’d like to set a release date in the first quarter of 2023.
And it can’t come soon enough.
