I think it’s safe to say that among anyone who writes either professional or as a hobby, there’s a general consensus that first drafts suck. They suck badly. Reading the first cut makes you want to shred everything you’ve done, start again from a blank page, and get it right this time. Then you take a deep breath and remember that then that would be your first draft and it would still suck. The only way to get past the suck is to finish the first draft, even if you know it’s full of holes, inconsistencies, and dialog that reads like English is your second language. It’s a vicious cycle, I tell ya.

The fact is I’m nowhere close to even the draftiest of first drafts. What I’ve got are eight chapters more or less vaguely connected by the slightest strand of plot. With enough time and attention that might be just enough framework to build a halfway decent story. Because I’m nowhere patient enough to wait until I have 60-70,000 well sculpted words, I’m adjusting the target in order to declare victory in small doses.

In the Victorian era, novels were published in small segments and often appeared in magazines before the entire novel was printed as a standalone volume. Using the past as a guide, my new target is to craft a story in four or five major sections and release each serially as they reach a satisfactory level of “done-ness.” With e-publishing, that seems to be a perfectly common way of doing business. And let me tell you, 15,000 coherent words are a hell of a lot easier to string together than 60,000 of even the most rambling, nonsensical words you can imagine. It doesn’t hurt that you can sell each individual part of the serial as well as the final product – $.99 per segment, $2.99 for the whole, buy the set and save 25% off the serial issue price. Yeah, I think that’s the ticket.

Some writers, it seems, are blessed with inspiration. I’m not one of those lucky few, but what I lack in inspiration, I more than make up for with sheer determination to throw words against the page until they stick in some semblance of order. Just think of me as a million monkeys randomly banging away at the keyboard. Eventually I’m almost surely going to stumble my way into Shakespeare territory… although I’d settle for Suzanne Collins or Stephanie Meyer’s neighborhood, too.