Finishing a draft

On Monday I came to the end of the current draft of the wip (I've written on Fictionbitch about the all-consuming nature of the process), and this is the state my room was in after I printed the last page and walked away from it all. That's my old writing table to which I'm crazily, psychologically attached - I got it from a junk shop when I was a hard-up single parent and sat down then and wrote The Birth Machine on it. Everything I've written since - apart from what I've written in Wales -  has been written on that, so it feels really important to the writing process for me.

Scattered on the floor is the previous draft which I tore apart so radically, which is why it's all over the place, and the new draft - 40,000 words shorter! - is sitting on top of the printer. Under the table are the Pukka pads in which I hand wrote each day before typing up: I found I had to do that, cut right away from the previous printed draft, even when I kept the scenes, because I had a new overall perspective affecting the language, however subtly. So it was very much a rewrite...

On the desk are the notes I made last April, when I first started on it all, and the charts and timelines I drew for the characters and scenes, since I was changing the structure so radically (making it much more linear, in fact) with all their page references. In January, after a long break to promote The Birth Machine reissue, I abandoned that scheme and started again, having seen that I could make the book even simpler, but the charts with their page refs were still useful, and I used them right up to the end.

Notice the bits on the floor. But I won't be doing any cleaning in that room until I've done the editing...
It's never been decorated, either, and I'm not sure it ever will be...