It's DONE! ISH!

I finished my second draft just now. It's the toughest one to do, usually. I usually write the first one half-drunk, and it shows. But it makes the empty page less intimidating. This is my clean-up/rewrite draft. Anything that changed between drunk writing and sober editing a couple weeks later needs to be implemented. So this thing had roughly 40 pages added to it, and not much of it was vamping. A lot of scenes were changed, and all of my second-stringers were fleshed out. I established the interrelationships more/better. It was a lot of fucking work, if you'll pardon the colloquialism.

So next is the spot-edit draft, which is little tweaks here and there, where I add bits that I think are necessary to make the story more coherent. Then I do my fat-trimming draft, which is 1000% necessary, as this thing is like 122 pages right now. But it's best if it starts off a fatty, because it gives me room to compress, work out (AND BRUTALLY CRUSH) the weak bits, which I find ultimately leads to a good final product.

I did a lot of my analysis in my off-time, as the amount of new scenes meant that I had to go ANOTHER week without looking at it. But it was for the best. It let me distance myself, so rather than perfect scenes as I had first written them, I changed them around in my mind a bit. They're better this way. They make more sense. The pacing is more natural, and I have a solid ending. I like it far better than the original ewok-celebration one. Not that this is a Star Wars or anything. It was just a similar ending.

This one leaves a sequel available, despite being a complete movie. I mean, if it gets made and bombs, no one's sitting there wondering when the next one comes out. But if it blows up, they wouldn't have to cobble together another one, like 300: Rise of an Empire. It was so forced that it felt like a brain shart. But now's not the time and this ain't the place.

In any case, roughest draft is DONE. I'm off to do a fun thing. I've earned it.