Over the past month I’ve been working diligently on my book “Out of the Night” and I’m very happy with how the second draft is coming along. Way better than the first draft by a long shot. I’ve found the majority of the holes and am slowly working it out so that everything makes sense and flows together. I was hoping that the 3rd draft would be just a grammar/spelling check draft, but as I near the ending of the 2nd draft, I have a feeling the 3rd draft will take care of looking for more holes and that the 4th draft will be grammar/spell check. I just feel like there’s something else missing from it, but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. I’m sure I’ll figure out what it is, though.
At the same time I’m torn. Part of me wants to keep going with this. I want to finish putting this all together by the end of the year so I can start sending it out, but at the same time I kind of feel like maybe I should take a short hiatus. And when I say short, I mean like a week off from working on it to focus on something else. I’m getting that feeling again that I want to get shorter pieces published in the mean time, but all I’ve been doing recently is focusing on “Out of the Night”. Which isn’t a bad thing. I ignored “Out of the Night” for the entire summer. Which is a reason why I don’t want to go on a hiatus. I’m afraid that if I do I’ll never come back to it, which would really stink because I really like how it’s coming along.
A new project I want to work on is a chapbook. I have two ideas for this:
1) Writing it in dream like sequences that might or might not make sense, but definitely interesting.
2) Writing one in the perspective of a dog
These ideas though haven’t gotten far in my head. I have no idea what they’d be about. Just the idea of how I would like to write them. So for now I think I will stick with my book, and hold these chapbook ideas off until later. There are still a few short story ideas I want to try to do, so maybe I will try to work on those and switch off every other day so I get a little breather. Or maybe that’s just my feelings today, and I really don’t want to break off. We shall see.
Casey Tingle 
Sounds like you’re making great progress. 🙂 I went into the third draft thinking it would just be a quick clean-up job, but I quickly realized that it was more about tightening up the story and finding the remaining holes. The third time through, you really start to see what needs to be done and it’s a culmination of everything you learned during the first two drafts. It was so unexpected, but I really enjoyed the process.
This response really encouraged me 🙂 Thank you for sharing!