Weird how things seem to fall into place, at least time-wise.
I finished reading/revising draft #4 of Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series on 6/22/20 (I wrote about that here!)…
Now, one month and a day later, I’ve just finished the reading/revising of Draft #5 of Book #8. While a full month and a day have passed, in reality it took me a little less than three weeks to do the read-through/pen & ink revision of the novel.
There was one full week I didn’t work on the book because I was traveling and there were a couple of days I transferred some of my revisions of this draft to the computer, which I will now do with the rest of the book.
I know its going to come across as self-serving, but I’m freaking so proud of the way this book is coming together. I genuinely feel like it may be one of the better novels in this series, and that’s saying quite a bit because I felt like I was done with it -excepting an Epilogue book- after Legacy of the Argus!
In fact, my original intention way, way back when I was finishing up Legacy of the Argus was that the next novel would indeed be the “Epilogue” story I’ve already pretty much written.
However, and forgive me for repeating myself, I found the “Epilogue” story was rather… slight. Like only 50 pages or so long versus my usual approximately 200 pages long novels (these are printed with 10 point lettering -quite small- and single spaced. Word count is often in/around 80,000 – 100,000 words).
So at first I tried to expand on the Epilogue story, fiddling around with some stuff that, frankly, led nowhere while managing, at least for a while, to waste precious time.
That’s the way it goes sometimes, though: You put your energy into something and it just doesn’t pan out.
After many months of hard work I realized I was spinning my wheels. Luckily, not all was not lost. In this process I wrote a couple of new introductory pieces, pieces I would wind up also discarding but which began pointing me in a positive direction.
It was that spark, a side road from where I was, that proved to make the whole journey worthwhile.
Now, a year plus later, those bird-crumbs have led me to create a novel that, while still not quite done (I figure I’ll need at least two, possibly three more drafts to complete it), is something I’m extremely happy with.
So, starting tomorrow, its time to put away my red pen and sit behind the computer and put all those revisions I made on paper into the novel’s Word file.
Once done, its time to print the whole damn thing up and give it another read-through.
We’re getting close, folks, and I can’t wait to get this out to you!