Celebrating the completion of the latest draft of the novel

Today I completed the latest draft of my novel. Phew. Decided to celebrate with a ride along a deserted south Atlantic beach on a rented bicycle followed by a pizza and a can of Coke. We novelists know how to have a good time. This draft was started at the beginning of March, so it’s taken me almost three months to complete. That’s nothing in the grand scheme of this book, which I started way back in the last century, and which received practically no attention from me at all between completing the first draft in 2001 and waiting until I had the necessary time this year to devote to the task of completing the rewrites.

For this draft I’ve gone through the entire novel, sometimes making changes to details of punctuation and word order, sometimes rewriting extensively, and sometimes adding entire pages of new text where I felt it was needed. I didn’t have a specific agenda for this draft: I felt it was important just to refamiliarise myself with the story as well as fixing and improving the writing along the way. Sections have been cut and sections have been added, but what started out as 167,000 words is now 174,000 words.

In the final few days of this edit I needed to update a few things. For example, in one scene the hero, Matt, is flown by the US Air Force in an F14 fighter jet in my original draft, penned late last century. Turns out that the F14 was retired from service in 2006. Rewriting this sequence required almost a whole day researching the type of plane that replaced it, together with its fuel capacity and range, its inflight refuelling techniques, its weapons and defensive systems, its ejector seat system and the survival rations a pilot would have if he had to bail out. Readers can be very fussy if they discover any details like those are inaccurate.

There was also a section that I had already updated twice before in previous drafts to bring it up to date, but which now seemed antiquated once again. Originally the Guatemalan scientist characters were storing important information on floppy disks. I updated this in the late nineties to writeable CDs, and then in 2001 to writeable DVDs. But people don’t really do that these days – it’s currently either USB flash drives or USB external drives, so I had to change it again. In the future most storage will probably be online, but that doesn’t make for great drama: I have special forces soldiers fighting their way into a research compound to steal data, and it wouldn’t be as exciting if they just sat in an Internet café and downloaded it.

The scrolls referred to in the title of the book appear towards the end of the story. I’ve written each of the scrolls in full, and they tell the story of the rise and fall of an ancient civilisation and the terrible thing they have set in motion that threatens our world today. The description of the actual discovery of the scrolls was rather skimpy in the original draft. Maybe I was writing quickly, knowing I was close to finishing the first draft after writing it for several years, keen just to get it finished? It needed more dramatic tension, more detail, more realism. So I’ve spent this week researching the Dead Sea Scrolls: what they were made of; why they survived for two thousand years; how they were handled; how they were scanned. Now when the archaeologists see the scrolls for the first time the detail and accuracy make the scene so much more gripping.

I also researched whether ancient scrolls could be read without unrolling them – turns out there’s a machine in England the size of a small village that can read rolled-up text using ultra-powerful X-rays. But this won’t be available to my characters in Cairo so I had to develop an alternative system for them to use to open and scan the ancient texts without inflicting too much damage.

So what’s next? I wanted to have this novel completed by the end of May, which would have required at least three or four drafts to have been written by about now. Those subsequent drafts won’t take as long as this one, but I do have some fairly complex subplots to weave in and I think I need to extend my three month schedule by an extra month. So 30^th of June is now my deadline for finishing the book. I’ll keep on blogging about my progress as much as I can during that time, and I’ll also remind myself of the big celebration that awaits this novel’s completion: a really big pizza and two cans of Coke.

Then it’s time to start thinking about the sequel, and I’ve already got ideas for that. One of the ideas is to write the book in 6 solid months instead of spread over 14 years, which I think is the best idea for a book I’ve ever had.