{"id":216,"date":"2010-01-08T10:32:11","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T14:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/?p=216"},"modified":"2010-01-08T10:32:36","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T14:32:36","slug":"closing-in-on-a-first-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/?p=216","title":{"rendered":"Closing in on a First Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;\">After months of delving into Eleanor&#8217;s early life, I\u00a0am closing in on the first draft of TO BE QUEEN.\u00a0 I find myself moving into high gear, as I always do this close to the end of a novel. Of course, once I have the draft completed, re-writes begin.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;\">Re-writes are an adventure, too, but a different adventure altogether. Writing is hard. Staying in the chair with a deadline looming is harder.\u00a0 But there is a special magic\u00a0to a first draft, a\u00a0kind of alchemy. Though I love each incarnation of my novels, in the first draft, I get to hear the story, unedited, from the lips of my characters. In re-writes I have to go back and fix all my mistakes, and the mistakes that my editor finds. With this first draft, there is only me and Eleanor, working together toward a shared goal: making her live again.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><span style=\"font-size: small;\"><span style=\"font-family: Times New Roman;\">I have almost reached that goal once more. I am almost sorry to see this first draft completed. But along with a sense of accomplishment is the joy that, soon, I will sit in the chair again, and start on the second draft.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After months of delving into Eleanor&#8217;s early life, I\u00a0am closing in on the first draft of TO BE QUEEN.\u00a0 I find myself moving into high gear, as I always do this close to the end of a novel. Of course, once I have the draft completed, re-writes begin. Re-writes are an adventure, too, but a &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/?p=216\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Closing in on a First Draft<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ChristyEnglish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}