The Nuts and Bolts of Writing a Novel

I'm going to give a brief walkthrough of the journey thus far pertaining to writing my book.

The first thing I did was simply to plant myself in front of the word processor (Open Office 3.3) and compose a first draft. In double-spaced, twelve point Times New Roman, this document ended up at 691 pages and took a little over two months to finish.

My next step is revising the text, which I am still literally in the middle of. I've run into some interesting quirks during the revision process.

Of paramount importance was bringing the text into conformity with standard manuscript format (which I would've used from the start had I known what it was then). My 691 page Times New Roman, twelve point document swelled to over 800 pages upon conversion to the mandatory Courier 10 Pitch font.  I'd also been using asterisks to denote time breaks in the first draft, and I had to replace all of these with single pound signs.

The aesthetic work done, I began editing the whole book for spelling and grammatical mistakes, as well as for continuity errors and anything else that I felt detracted from the narrative. JJ kindly made himself available to proofread the first draft, and his comments proved to be a big help.

I'm currently on chapter 40, page 511 of the second draft. I'm averaging about 24 pages a day, so the manuscript should be finished in two weeks or so.