My Writing Process - Part 3 - The First Draft

The first draft, that dreaded first draft.  It took me years to sit down and write the first draft of Triumvirate (recall it was the first book I ever wrote), and I wrote it chapter by chapter, and hell I wrote the ending of the book and finished the part between it and the middle after the fact, once again chapter by chapter. Often when I write, I just sit down at the computer and off it goes, and I even killed off someone and it took me five minutes to go back and see what I had done.
The beauty of the first draft is that you get the ideas down, the ideas you want to pursue and it doesn't matter if in one chapter a character has blond hair, while in the following one, it is now black, or hell, bald.  The true idea of the first draft is to just get the fucker down on the screen.  Now I doubt I am unique in this style, but if I didn't have computes, man I would be doing this long hand and then beating it out on the old typewriter.  I still remember one of my friends had a character walking into a sticky situation with no rifle, and then three hundred words later, bam, the dude was blowing away critters with a .306.   This is normal, there is nothing else to be said about that.
I know in evolving my story from the first draft onwards, there were many changes, especially in who they were just what they were.  It was while writing the first draft of Triumvirate that the first draft of Genesis arose, which then led to the first draft of Huntercats as it answered questions that I needed to move Triumvirate on from the first draft stage.
The first draft allowed me to use whatever the hell language I wanted as means to unequivocally get across mood in a very direct and primitive way.  In the comparison of older drafts of my work versus the later ones, there is less swearing, less dialogue in fight scenes, because when it was put in there, it was there for a reason. 
Environment plays a key role in being able to write and keep everything in mind.  My writing used to be done in a smaller bedroom that my computer shared with my two rabbits who, well anyone who has pet rabbits knows how bratty they really are.  So despite the distraction of fighting rabbits off and on, and a cat that tried to break them up, I got stuff written.  But the trick was I had one place I always sat down with, either with a coke in the day, or later, booze.  I had my references around me, all that I needed was at my fingertips.
Many authors make notes before they write, that is entirely up to you as a new author.  Me, I hardly ever make any notes beyond key things that I need to know, nor do I always plan a scene ahead of time.  I find it is much more exciting to just let it unfold and go with the flow.  Overall, don't worry about mistakes in your first draft, rather just go with it, get  your ideas down on paper, the course your book is taking, and fix it all up when the time comes for editing.  And it is through editing that you will come to appreciate the image below, because a lot of first drafts end up going no further than just that.

Yup, been there and done that.