It occurs to me its been a while since I’ve offered an update on book #7, the concluding chapter, of the Corrosive Knights series.

Basically, I’m in what I call the third draft of the book though, truth be told, this is probably the first “complete” first draft.

OK, I know that sounds confusing but here goes: The first draft of the book generally told the story I wanted to tell but with some very big gaps which were meant to be filled up in the future.  That draft wound up being a puny 50,000 or so words and I knew even then considering all the bases that were to be covered that this book would probably be my longest Corrosive Knights novel.

To date, my longest Corrosive Knights novel runs slightly north of 110,000 words so there was a lot to be done still.

However, I needed to print out what I had to that point, read through it, then get a clearer idea of what needed to be done next.  I did this and for the second draft of the book had approximately 65,000 words written up.

Once again, when I got to the end of that draft I knew there was still a hell of a lot to add into the book but, again, felt the need to print what I had, read through it, and then hit it again.

So, as I said above, I’m on the third draft of the book and roughly half-way to the end.  I now have approximately 95,000 words written and know there will be plenty more to come.  I’ve got the first half to three quarters of the book pretty well written out though there will be some bits and pieces that need to be trimmed.

This is a natural process.

I wish I could sit down and in one go write up a book start to finish but that simply isn’t the way I work.  Things need to be clarified and refined and sometimes a thunderbolt will hit me and I realize “don’t do this, do that” and I have to go back and re-work sections of the book.

Again, this is a natural process.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can finish this book by the end of this year but, this far out, that’s a hard thing to promise.  Regardless, once this draft of the book is done, I’m reasonably sure I’ll have just about everything I wanted to put in the book there…and then some.

Hopefully we’ll soon move to the next stage of writing, where I’m more focused on refining what I have and don’t need to add any new material.