Writing Update #2: The Worst First Draft I’ve Ever Written
/affectionate
Jump: The Update
Current WIP: Project Butterfly
Draft: #2
Today’s word count: 15,805
Anticipated release: Mid 2026?
You heard that right, friends. The first draft of Project Butterfly is officially complete and every beautiful word of it sucks.
Like sucks sucks. Whatever you’re imagining writers usually produce in a first draft, throw that away—or maybe don’t, because you might accidentally spot my terrifying first draft already sitting in the trash.
There is no plot. There is no coherence, no direction, and characters go missing without warning. The chapters don’t connect, the locations make no sense, and the prose itself? Well, let’s just say “his heart pounded” about 6 bajillion times. And so did hers. And so did mine.
Yet I’ve never been so pleased with a first draft in all my life.
Because I made it bad on purpose.
I’ve spoken a fair amount about how my previous book dragged its uncooperative little feet. Perfectionism has always been a thing for me, but writing Deceit was a full-on boss battle. Like, imagine Bowser pummeling me for months with his bare hands, laughing taunts such as, “Graydon Marr would never act like that!!” as his turtle-shaped silhouette blocks out the sun.
I needed the book to be good. In fact, I needed it so much that for a few months, I was stuck perfecting every sentence before allowing myself to move on. I was rewriting early chapters over and over before I even understood where the book was heading, all because I couldn’t stand to say, “I don’t know yet,” and move on.
If you’re beginning to suspect that this is a terrible method for writing books, I can confirm from experience that it super duper is.
Great stories come from iteration. Tightly edited stories with lovable characters, believable motives, and no plot holes come from a lot of iteration.
But you can’t iterate nothing.
You can, in fact, polish a turd
— Annika Snow, 2025
They say the first draft just needs to exist, and they—bless them—are right. Someone on reddit took my little metaphor a crude step further and advised, “Take a shit on the blank page so you have something to shape.”
This quote was very wrongly attributed to Stephen King, but I think he’d like it all the same, with perhaps one minor addition:
Actually finish the draft.
Even authors who extensively plan can’t always predict when the story might, for lack of a better phrase, “go off on its own.” Stories are living, breathing things, and room for pivoting is necessary because there are many things you can’t know until you’re actually writing.
I’m not a planner, so when I start a story, I know very little. And trust me, I’ve tried planning, but it’s so antithetical to how my brain works that it caused more problems than it solved.
My husband sometimes likes to compare me to Claude Shannon—not because I, too, am the father of information theory, but because he did his best thinking while riding around Bell Labs on his unicycle.
That’s all to say I write with vibes. You know those early 2000s music videos? The ones where there’s no plot, just lots of rapidly panning jump cuts? She’s in a house. She’s in a bar. CLOSE UP OF RAIN. Her hair’s blue now. Unicycles! That sort of thing.
Finishing the first draft allows me to see all the weird music video footage floating around in my brain. And now that I know what I’ve got to work with, I can start putting the clips in the correct order.
Project Butterfly 2.0
The thing you actually came here for!!!
You’ll be happy to know that Draft 2 is not only going very well, but also ahead of schedule. I was hoping to start writing it in July, so the fact that I have seven chapters under my belt is promising.
And those chapters make sense. There is officially a plot, a sense of direction, etc. You absolutely could read them in order and follow the story—which honestly, after “trusting the process” with Draft 1, is very cathartic.
There will still be a lot of changes to make in Draft 3, but they will be far less exploratory (ie. a scene should actually be in another character’s POV, the bar needs to be on the edge of a forest rather than in the city, etc). Just like with Draft 1, I’m prioritizing writing right now, not correctness, so when I change my mind or decide something isn’t working, I just make a note and carry on.
Other bits:
I hope to have Draft 2 done by the end of September.
I’m loosely planning the music video vibes of Book 2 as I go. I didn’t do that with Veilfall, and all I’ll say is this: NEVER AGAIN.
I’m working on cover designs (also for both books) and soooooo pretty ahhhhhhh
That’s all for June! ❤️
— Annika
