I finished the first draft of Frigid Nights the other day and I must say, I am both fulfilled and relieved. I felt that in the marathon that was writing that novel, the final chapters felt like I was low crawling and clawing my way towards the finish line. There will be plenty to edit but I can edit the crap out of a shitty novel but I can’t edit something that’s not down on paper.
Frigid Nights is still the working title which I plan to change to something that encapsulates the essence of the novel and also plan to add a little more to the actual plot, but I needed the rough draft there to be able to work out the kinks.
Now, as I did with Taking Chances, I plan to take a break from working on any novels. I may work on short stories, poems, and outlines for future novels but I plan to take a mini-vacation (but as you know, writers can’t go long without the itch to write flaring back up). During this vacation, I plan to read a lot. I have too many books on my “to read” list and need to start making some progress through those. I’ve been reading while working on FN but not as much as I should have and when I did, it was very spread out and inconsistent. I finished a couple books but I know I need to finish many more.
I plan to also write some short stories. Originally, Frigid Nights was just supposed to be a short story that I ended up running with but for the next few months, I plan on just doing short stories. that’s my goal. I want to develop my characters, my plots, and write with vigor and better language. I hope that this will make me a better writer so I can edit FN with better results but also allow me to experiment with genres and story types. I look forward to sitting down and reading the full first draft of FN to myself and see how awful I wrote XD but to enjoy the story I think I wrote to see if it came out how I imagined it in my head.
Drew Schroeder 