Memories of What Never Was - Draft 2 completed

So, after 2 months of working myself to death, I've finished the second draft of Memories of What Never Was.  If you're so inclined, you can read it by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.  Again, I write in manuscript format, which is double spaced, 12 point courier font, all itallicsare underlined rather than italicized, and there's a # to mark any blank lines.  I used to take the time to convert it to something that's a bit easier on the eye to read off my site, but it takes a considerable amount of time to do that, and when I realized how much time I was spending doing that in which I could be writing more, I just sort of stopped doing it.

Holy crap was that a lot of work.  I spent probably about 35-50 hours a week for the last 2 months working on this thing.  That's probably more time than I spent at my full time day job most weeks.  (for which I'm paid on salary, and which I get to go home after my work is done, no matter what time it is, so I get paid the same if I finish in 5 hours as I do if I finish in the 9 and a half I'm getting paid for, which gives me a pretty high incentive to get done as quickly as possible.) The first draft was really kind of a mess, and there were some rather big changes that I wanted to make to one of the characters, which then required a lot of changes being made to pretty much every chapter that she played more than a minor role in, because it changed her motivations as a character almost completely, which is not something I expected to happen when I first got the idea to make the change.  The reason I've been putting off doing this draft for so long, was because I was sort of dreading all of the work it was going to take to add these changes in, after I got the first chapter down and realized just how much work it was really going to be.  Large sections of text have either been added completely, completely replaced with other large sections of text, and many other small changes had to be made throughout literally every single interaction this character had with every single other character.  Figuring it all out is enough to drive someone insane.

In addition to changes to that particular character there were quite a few infuriatingly long run-on sentences, and quite a few ridiculously long paragraphs that all had to be broken up to reasonable sizes.  I usually use my second draft to fill in descriptive elements that are missing, some character personality elements, and to remove as many adverbs as I can.  I had so much other work that needed to be done that I didn't really get to a lot of that in this draft, and I mostly just focused on retructuring things, and getting the characters ironed out.  There are still a lot of things I need to work on with this one, mostly ironing out transitions between the changes I made in the second draft and the existing text left over from the first draft, and ironing out some more kinks in the writing.  It's still, very much, and unfinished product, but I feel that it's a big step closer to being done than it was when I finished the first draft.

And now, back to my Spires of Infinity rewrite.  It's been two months, which is probably enough to give me a bit of distance and help me find more problems that need to be fixed.  And I definitely need some time before I come back to Memories of What Never Was.  Going through that thing was pretty mentally exhausting.