Chapter 1 - Draft Complete

I've completed my draft of Chapter 1 of my novel and started work on Chapter 2.  As a result, all of my other writing has come to a standstill.  I'm doing this on purpose so I can stay focused on the story and get the whole thing written.  The last novel I started I got pretty far into, but really didn't know where it was going and got into a point where I didn't know where to go next.  It is titled "Getting Educated" and can be found on The Podge Cast Forums, here.

This time, I did a storyboard using my living room wall and a bunch of sticky notes of different colors.  I hashed it out with my focus committee (my wife and a friend familiar with the roots of the story) and worked out a better flow.  Simply explaining it to them helped focus the story for me and make it more concrete in my head.  I've then did a much more detailed story board of the first major arc and converted that into bullet pointed lists for each scene or group of scenes and ran it by my focus committee.  This helped point out some timing issues in the story and some gaps in the story.  I've moved the scenes that needed moving and added those missing.  Now I'm convert all those notes into the text of the novel.

I'm torn between sharing the material as it gets finished and wanting to wait until the entire draft is done and sharing the bits as I edit them.  I'll probably go with sharing the edited version, so you'll have to wait a while.  I want to have the first draft done by the end of March, which currently seems do-able with the restricted writing time I have now, so the wait won't be for ever, it'll just seem like it.

I'll post here as I get chapters done to keep folks up to date.

Later!