Success and Respite

     On this day, I have completed the first draft of Vampire Shadows. It clocked in quite a bit longer than my other one, which was ~70k. This one logs in at about 105k. Now, I probably would have finished it earlier, like in the first week of January, but I found I needed a short break and had to write "A Cold Night in the Grind" first, but more than that, as the end loomed, I realized I was trying to rush to get there, and that I wanted to skip over certain details just to get there. When I considered this in retrospect, I realized that to do so would be to short the readers and story. I needed those details. I needed to go back and fill in logically with what an investigator would do, not just get to the end. I had to take my time and carefully present the suspects, eliminate each of them in turn logically. Initially I simply had the final suspect confirmed simply by evidence alone with police making an arrest and discovering their own evidence to corroborate his, and my PI didn't even have a face-to-face conversation with the culprit. I thought this would be an interesting twist, but at the same time I realized that a dedicated PI wouldn't rest and wait for the cops to pick up the person, and that he would at least face down the culprit and trust to his gut more than rely on scientific evidence, so I hope the extra time and space spent on the novel which I had initially anticipated going to 85k max has been worthwhile.
     To celebrate, I gave myself the day off from writing. Tomorrow, though, I'll be back up and running, though what project will take my fancy now I'm not entirely sure. I will definitely be going back to revising my first novel, and may even put up the first chapter of it as a kind of teaser as well. Until then, though, I'm going to indulge in my glass of chocolate milk, and enjoy my well earned rest.