First Impression After the First Read Through

I finished reading my first draft of my NaNo novel between yesterday and today. Total time spent: 5.76 hours Immediate Thought: It's not bad for a first draft Just the first draft, mind you. It needs hell of a lot work before it is even close to publishable standard, but for a first draft it is good. One of the main reasons is because there are very few plot holes, and even those ones aren't very big. It's the first time that I have a consistent enough first draft that is not missing a lot of thing, so it is a big plus in my book. And that is thanks to the outline. I best remind myself that when I am feeling lazy to do outline for the next book. The best thing: Dialogue Epsecially the parts that made me laugh out loud, and there were quite a few bits. No, it's not a humourous novel, but I have a couple of characters, especially a healer who is totally snippy, and his comments just make me laugh. The worst thing: Hardly any description to get the feel for the world When I read the story, I know exactly where these people are, and what their world is like. But I know it because it's in my head. I created it. It's like talking about a city that you have grown up in to someone who has never visited it. You will rarely mention anything special about your city, because take it for granted. It's just ordinary. But when a tourist looks at it, they look at it with fresh eyes, and they need more details to appreciate it. So while my world is build deeply enough, it is not conveyed in the story. Pace: Fast A part of it is definitely due to lack of descriptions - as you can probably tell since I finished reading all 81539 words in just under 6 hours. I would like to keep the pace fast, but perhaps it doesn't need to be this fast. Conclusion There are things to fix, no doubt about that. Writing needs to be improved. There are a lot of grammatical errors. And just generally the whole feel of the story needs more depth - not through plot, that's there, but through writing. What next? Because I am still working to figure out editing method that works for me, I am dividing it into steps. This was the first step, and it worked. It was useful. It gave me the whole feel of the story. Now, I am taking a very short amount of time to fix some common spelling errors and such, or things like putting a wrong name, and also correcting some formatting errors. But this isn't going to be a detailed step. Just a quick one, where I will only be correcting things that I can spot instantly. Anything that requires more thought or decision will wait for a later stage. Once I do that - then the next step will be to look at the few notes I made during the first step, and fix those things.