There’s no feeling quite like finishing a novel draft.
Sure the novel still has a ways to go with revision and polishing and endless rereadings to make sure everything’s exactly the way I want it, and sure the novel’s still not quite ready to be shown off to friends or at a point where I can say it’s anywhere close to finished—but that feeling of I accomplished something! I wrote a fucking book! feels pretty damned good.
I’ve been working on Once Upon a Complex, my third novel (technically fourth if you count my unpublished Japan novel) since last January, and I finally finished the draft earlier this month. All told, this draft took a lot less time than the Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers draft because I didn’t take any long breaks, but it still took longer than I wanted it to because there were many weeks during the year when I couldn’t quite find time for writing.
The draft is still incredibly rough—both in terms of things like character names and technical details needing to be filled in, and in terms of scenes not flowing the way they should—but again, it’s technically finished, with a Beginning, Middle, and Ending, and all the major elements in place. Having a rough but finished draft to work from is super-helpful for me when it comes to structuring the story, since having this basic grasp of the entire book helps me go back to the beginning and start revising toward what the finished novel will actually look like.
A Darker, Grittier Novel
Once Upon a Complex tackles topics I’ve written about before: relationship troubles, young(er) people having trouble finding their way, economic stress, and creative frustrations. But, it does so in a different way that I wanted to feel more immediate and urgent. The novel still has jokes in it (I mean, how could I not?), but in general the tone is darker and more direct. I wanted to explore the characters’ fears and anxieties more fully, and needed a different voice to make that happen.
I saw a quote from the musician St. Vincent this morning that sums up my goals with this novel pretty well: “Music is a car that you can wreck over and over again and walk away safely.” That’s how I want readers to feel about this novel.
Print and Go
I always do my revising on paper, printing out a copy of the draft, making revisions by hand and in a separate notebook, then typing them into the computer later while listening to music. It’s a slow system, but it works for me—I like seeing the paragraphs on the printed page with fresh eyes, and having the entire novel in hard copy makes it easier to flip through quickly to find changes. Paper copies also give me a better idea of scale, where knowing that two components of a scene happen, say, three pages apart, feels more real on the printed page than it does scrolling through MS Word.
I’m also in Japan for the next two months, and I thought starting on revisions would be a good way to begin the trip. Rather than printing a full copy of the novel and lugging it to the airport in my suitcase, since I don’t have a printer here, I loaded the chapter files on to a USB stick, brought it down to my local Lawson convenience store, and used the printer there for ¥10 per page (about 6-7 cents a page).
The Lawson printer has an easy to use English menu and is pretty straightforward—my one mistake was dividing the novel into separate files instead of one big file, since the Lawson printer won’t let you print multiple files at once. This meant that I had to load up every chapter one at a time, select the B&W and single-sided options, and confirm the sizing, etc. before clicking Print, which caused the process to take twice as long as it should have. (Luckily, though, no one else needed to use the printer while I was there!)
I also forgot (as usual) to add page numbers to the chapter files, so when I go through to make revisions I’ll add these by hand in case anything gets mixed up. (Writing page numbers in pen also makes for a relaxing ritual at the beginning of the writing day that helps get me warmed up.)
Another interesting aspect of this is that Japan, like most of the world, uses standard A4-sized paper, which is 8.3 inches wide by 11.7 inches long in contrast to the standard US 8.5 inches by 11 inches. While the difference in width feels negligible, the difference in length jumps out immediately, with the unformatted pages adding wider margins at the top and bottom. (I could have changed the paper size in Word before printing and saved some money, but of course I didn’t think to.) Though I find the wide margins slightly disorienting, they do create a larger space for scribbling notes and edits, which feels like it’ll be useful for making larger changes.
Next Steps
I’ll likely post more novel updates as I move through the editing process, so do keep your eyes out! My goal is to revise multiple drafts of the novel into something I feel comfortable submitting by the end of 2026, which feels pretty doable considering the length and how far I’ve come in conceptualizing the plot and characters. In the meantime, I’ve got a few side projects I want to work on as well, so I’ll keep you posted!
And as always, thanks for following along with my posts about the writing process—I’m glad someone besides me finds this stuff interesting :-)
