Outside of all forms of gaming, one of my biggest passions is fiction writing. Tonight, I started on the seventh chapter of the second draft of a novel that I've been working on for the past several years. My progress on the rough draft had been pretty slow, mostly due to the fact that I had written a significant portion of it while I was still in college, but this new draft has been developing at a fair rate. Even though its still fairly early, the pacing and flow of the book is much, much better than in the rough draft, and for that, I have given my thanks to a friend who was kind enough to do me the huge favor of reading, critiquing and partially editing the original.

Writing this new draft has been almost a completely different experience. When I composed the rough draft, I was mainly concerned with taking all of the elements of the story that had developed in my head over the years since high school and putting them down on paper. It didn't really matter if what I wrote was good or not, so long as there was hope that it was coherent and capable of being shaped into a good story through revising. Once it was finished, and once my friend helped out with her advice, I went back to the beginning and started by organizing a chapter-by-chapter outline. Even before I started the second draft, I was able to give the story a much better structure, and I was able to eliminate all of the unnecessary portions that had crept in while I was rambling my way through the rough draft.

I don't know how long it will take me to complete the second draft, but once it's finished, further revisions shouldn't be nearly as drastic. To put it in the perspective of game development, if the rough draft were to be considered the alpha build, I suppose that the second draft could be considered the beta, and all revisions beyond that will probably be comparable to play testing and bug squashing. I'm hopeful that people will be able to read the complete work one day, but right now, I'm just happy to be as far along on the project as I am.