Been a while since my last update (which was posted just a little over a month ago, on 2/27/18) on my latest novel, #7, in the Corrosive Knights series.
As I mentioned before and as is pointed out in the graphic above, Book #7 in this series presents a conclusion to the main story line, though there will be a Book #8 (I’ve already written the full first draft of it) that presents an Epilogue to the story.
So a month ago I wrote how I was done with the 4th draft of this novel. It was a big event, given that with this completed draft I had most of the elements of the story in place and felt that future drafts would tilt more and more toward grammatical/stylistic/spelling revision rather than adding new story elements.
Welp, in the month that followed I finished reading this latest draft and adding a cornucopia of notes, revisions, and deletions. There will be some stuff I need to work on harder than others. Toward the middle of the book there is a part that needs work and likely some new passages/pages. Similarly, the book’s climax and conclusion also needs more work.
However, the rest of the book proved essentially what I thought: Needing work on a grammatical/spelling/presentation level. This includes, obviously, making passages clearer and more precise, perhaps eliminating some repetition. Streamlining and making sure the reader will have a smooth, clear work to follow.
As opposed to the 4th draft, it took me, despite plenty of other things robbing me of time, three weeks or so to re-read and provide written notes on the work, compared to taking something like 2-3 months to read through and make notes on the 3rd draft!
As of a few days ago, I’m hard at work on the computer putting all those notations into the new draft. Once again and in comparison to the previous draft, this is so far moving quite smoothly. In two days I worked through 41 pages of the 288 and hope to keep a similar pace up to the end. Of course, things will slow down when I get to that middle section and climax, as these will require more work.
Regardless, things are so far moving very smoothly and I feel like this novel, at this stage, is farther along -and therefore closer to being “done”- than were all my other books at a similar point in time.
I’ve noted before that for most of my novels it takes something like 12 (!) drafts to feel a book is indeed “finished”. Considering how far along I feel this book is at this point in time, I suspect it won’t take me quite that many drafts before declaring the book done.
Anyway, back to work!