So I finished this draft. Now what?

Dusting off the cobwebs (and are those BATS coming out of the black hole that is my blog???), I just wanted to announce that, no, this novel has not managed to kill me and yes, I in fact did finish this draft of it - yay me :D

I ended up shooting past my original word count goal of 80,000 words and ended up with a hunk of a 91,125 word drat that should be the third (or was it fourth?) draft of a novel I've been working on for four years now, but really this thing is more like a first draft than anything.

So now what do I do?

Three things, really:

Yes, I have a slight post-it-note addiction problem...

1.) Print the draft. Yes, the full draft. No matter how loudly the printer complains or how much ink/paper it takes (wait, is that smoke coming out of my printer???)

2.) Import the complete novel into Scrivener, if you have it. Honestly, this program alone has totally been worth buying a macbook (yes, I'm a recent mac-convert and I love it :D). Outlining and getting a good overview of your project is a breeze with the index cards and outlining tools of this program.

3.) Holly Lisle's One Pass Revision Method. My wonderfully awesome crit partner Parametric first recommended this to me and I'm finally ready to really try this (fortunately I already jotted down tons of notes regarding part 1 of this revision method and we'll see how the rest goes, I'll keep you posted).

So here's my To-Do-List for the next couple months:

1.) Revise EMPIRE OF LIGHT (It'd be lovely to have this completely revised by the end of October, but we'll see how much school and work life kick my otherwise reclusive ass ;))

2.) Critique lots of queries over in Absolute Write's Query Letter Hell (QLH), in hopes of getting a good grip on what works and what doesn't work in queries and come up with a workable query pitch for EMPIRE OF LIGHT that doesn't make me cringe.

3.) Outline and start THE GHOSTS I CALLED (TGIC), my YA urban fantasy featuring zombie dragonslayers, shirtless ghosts and a gender-changing main character.

3.) NaNoWriMo. Tentatively planning on either finishing TGIC or kicking off LEVITICUS (which I also need to outline), my "steampunk meets Firefly with vampires" idea.

So yes, it'll be a busy couple of months coming up. Hopefully I'll survive and will not fall prone to caffeine-induced cardiac arrest or just plain kill myself by being either too busy or (which is more likely) do something completely stupid. Here's hoping ;)