Lauderdale Progress

I have completed the second draft of Lauderdale.

Ahem. Excuse me.

I finished the second draft!!!!

I haven't actually read it, yet. The first draft, that was the big part. Then I sat down and thought of all the things I knew offhand were deficient in the first draft--names that needed changing, parts that needed beefing up or reducing (or eliminating in one case), subplots that needed to be expanded or deleted, and little picky technical things like whether or not the Porsche Cayenne was being sold yet in 1999-2000. (It wasn't. Foo. I had to go with the BMW X5, a lesser vehicle. If you know of a really strange or unusual SUV that was available in the 2000 model year and was large, please tell me.)

Making all those changes constituted the second draft. I figured that would take most of a month but, once I started, I finished it in seven days. Now I have to sit down and read the thing, which I've never actually done. I'll make notes while I do that, so I know what needs to be fixed in the third draft.

It's this third draft that I'll be sending to any interested readers. If you're interested, shoot me an email (M&D and Ayzair, you're already tagged).

I won't start reading it, though, until I finish the books I'm reading now. I don't want to be distracted. But I should finish these books fairly soon, probably in about a week, so I think I'm still very much on track to have the third draft prepared by October.