My Writing Journey: "The Ghost of Forsyth Academy", Part 5

I finally did it. I finished the first draft of my novel. And, even more impressive, I printed the whole thing out and stuck it in a binder.

So what now? Obviously I'm going to have to edit it. There are so many things that need to be fixed. For example, I want to have more of a focus on the creepiness of the setting and play up some of the supernatural elements. I also feel like some of the characters have roles that fade in significance and I want to even that out, and I feel like the exploration of some of the core themes - e.g. grief, starting over, etc. - are flat out ignored in some areas of the manuscript.

But before I do any of that, I need to take a break from this manuscript, this genre, all of it. I started with a short break from writing altogether, but that didn't last long. So instead, I'm focusing on my hero's journey-epic fantasy. With any luck, I'll finish the first draft of that novel in a few months, and then I'll put that away to go edit this manuscript.

Since that's very, very unlikely, however, I'll probably give this manuscript a few months of rest (maybe even up to six months) and then I'll go back to it to edit it.

My last note about this manuscript before I stop thinking about it for the next several months: compiling in Scrivener to print does not work. Compiling to a LibreOffice Doc and then printing does work. Hopefully I remember that for the next manuscript. I probably won't though.