The new chapter one

I actually feel quite accomplished today. I have officially finished my NEW chapter one!
It now introduces both my main characters, with physical descriptions included. In re-reading my first NaNo draft, I had absolutely *no* descriptions of my characters. How did I miss that, exactly?

I'm also more satisfied with the world-building I was able to do in the first chapter. This time around, since I'm using two characters, I was able to describe the main city of the novel and the surrounding environment. Hopefully the reader will get a nice image in their head of what the world looks like, time frame, and level of technology.

The last thing - I also hint at a conflict or inciting incident within the middle of the chapter. It weaves together multiple characters, subplots, and questions about the world waiting to be addressed in Chapter Two. Overall, I'm really happy at the new draft!

I do want to try something different with this draft. During NaNo, I actually went over my writing a lot each day so that a portion of it would be good enough to post on my blog. I thought it would be cool to share snippets of my story with the world! However, I put so much effort into cleaning up those dialog pieces that I severely slowed myself down from finishing the overall book.

With this draft, I won't concern myself with making it "reader-ready." All I want to do is write THE WHOLE BOOK first. Then I'll use the technique of more drafts to fill in the blanks

• The second draft will be filling in missing dialog, character actions and emotions, and more world-building.
• The third draft will be the start of real editing: removing passive voice, create good sentence structure, take out the adverbs, etc. 

With these drafts in mind, it was a lot less pressure to just "write" my chapter, and even more satisfying to finish it. Now it's time for a coffee break with butter cookies. De-lish!