Off to a good start

Today, I completed a dreadful first draft of the story I started the other day...

It's not just dreadful though - it's appalling. Incomplete sentences, time jumps between scenes, repeated phrases, millions of adjectives and adverbs, blank spaces for characters' names... Present are many of the kinds of mistakes a rookie writer makes when he/she writes a story, gets to the end of it and shrieks 'Yay! I've written a story! I'm going to publish it!'

Difference is - I'm now an experienced enough author to recognise that this IS the first, s****y draft, and will never see the light of day in anything other than my notebook.

But this s****y draft has potential. From here on in, there WILL be changes made which (hopefully) improve the base material. In front of this s****y draft lies the typing up onto the laptop (the main computer gives me migraines now because of my vari-focal glasses), the line by line and word by word editing to make it tight, the 'getting-inside-the-character's-head' moments to add which will draw the reader in, and the fine polishing of the resulting whole to make it shine like a diamond.

Then - and only then - will it be submitted for judgement by my peers in a little in-house competition on the Word Cloud. It'll be good to be back there - I feel I've rather neglected that community of late...

But for now, I have a date with the laptop and a brutal overlord...