Draft #2 Begins

I decided it was time to begin work on the second draft of my novel today. It has been nearly two weeks since I finished the first draft, which was the time frame I gave myself to wait before I began work on draft two. I had started on book number two of my series, but came to a halt on chapter three where now I must start digging into some research before I can go much further, and since I was in no mood today for research, I began the second draft of book one.

The first thing I did was opened a second file and left off chapter one and went straight to rewriting chapter two. Chapter one could be looked at as back story, where the real story begins in chapter two. Everything that happens in chapter one is discovered throughout the book by my main character Vlad anyway, which is what had happened to him that led to him being taken in and raised by peasants. He finds the answers, sort of, when he goes back to his old man, but he is reluctant to give Vlad very much information. Later on in the book he learns even more about this past that happens in chapter one and then some, so I figured, to save on word count, the reader could just discover his past as Vlad does.

So chapter two is now chapter one, and boy does it need some rewriting, the narration is stiff and the dialogue is quite tacky. I'm seven pages into the rewrite and I've used very little of the original draft, even though the chain of events remain the same. I also added to the chapter's word count already. Doh! The writing was rather thin so it actually did need a little extra padding to give it more flavor. I just hope I don't end up doing this to every chapter. The goal is to cut the word count, not add. But! It is way too early yet, I've only just begun. So we shall see as I go.