Planning, Playing, Praying

As you know, I have finished my first ever first draft and decided to sit down and away from it. Finally, I have found a solution to my terrible draft. I am now rewriting it in the second draft. This is helpful, because, to be honest, I didn’t know the characters well enough until I put them in that situation. They did things that really wouldn’t work in the real world and not true to them. It was as if I forced them to do objective B when they wanted to naturally do objective A.
So, now I have 31 chapters planned (versus the original 20) and roughly 73K word count (versus the just over 50K). This is great because now I can work on it, know the characters, and make a better second draft. And yes, I count rewriting as a draft. After all, if it wasn’t, you’d be completely changing the storyline. I’m not changing that much. It’s just better characterization and after thought.