Instead, I worked with my boss to schedule five consecutive Monday vacation days. I figured that Mondays would be the best day since I do all my household chores on the weekend and there would be few distractions. Today was the first day. I’d hoped to write three new pages and incorporate up to seven pages of the previous draft into the new. I exceeded my expectations by fifty percent-and I even goofed off a little in the afternoon.

For the rest of the week, ten pages of new and existing material is a reasonable goal. Next Monday, I’ll make sure I have even fewer things to distract me. (I needed a haircut and did some laundry that really could have waited.) If I stick with it, I could have this draft done by mid to late July.

The good news is that what I’ve written so far looks good. I’m currently taking Margie Lawson’s Empowering Characters’ Emotions course on-line and while I have less time than I’d like to participate, the lectures and assignments have helped me improve my writing a great deal. Now all I need to do is pick up the pace in order to meet the September 1 deadline.

Next up, I’ll wrestle “Big Little Blonde” onto the page. I started this one in March, got distracted, took it in a wildly new direction, and then crashed because (again) I didn’t really understand the characters. I’ve decided to go back to the original concept but salvage the offshoot for a different story another time.

Next year I intend to revise No Humans Involved and begin seeking representation for it, write at least half a dozen new short stories, and start research for a third novel.

Before I move on to a new project, it’s worth looking at what I’ve learned. The most important: don’t pause until the first draft is done. I first conceived NHI in the summer of 2008. I spent a couple months creating the outline, then set it aside for a year. When I came back to it, my concept had changed enough that the outline was no longer useful. I spent another month rethinking the outline. It would have been better if I’d written a draft from that first outline as soon as I’d finished it. Getting some distance is great between drafts. Until that first draft is done, though, delays are a waste of time.

Not all lessons come from errors. I was pleased to learn that for the most part, the outline methodology I’ve developed works very well. Solid scene outlines allowed me to write very rapidly. This is the second project to benefit from a detailed outline: the romance novella I wrote last spring went very quickly, too. In the future, I expect I’ll become adept at planning scenes in my head and will be able to write from a bullet-point outline. In the meant time, I’ve found what works for me.

The final lesson: I should focus my energy on one thing at a time. Until this week, I would work on the novel in the morning, then at lunch I’d work on something else, like a short story. Sometimes I’d even dabble with a third project at night. This week, I focused on NHI and wrote almost 8,000 words in four days. If I had done that from the beginning of the draft, I’d have finished a month ago. The story would have been more cohesive, too. As it was, I found myself drifting from the main idea a little as the weeks wore on. In the future, I’m going to devote my writing energy to one project at a time.

So what’s next? I’m not sure. I have several short stories that I need to complete, a novella to revise, and research to do toward a new novel. I’ll pick one tomorrow