I’m still alive: First Edit in progress

(this is all part of the One Novel Three-Month challenge. Click here for more info)

It’s been awhile since my last update, mostly because I got incredibly ill at the beginning of April and lost a solid two and half weeks of time working on this thing.

A bit of a crap setback, but thems the breaks. Since I recovered I’ve been hard at work editing the novel, going through my first pass of it. On April 2nd I finished the first draft, which came in at roughly 110K words. Far more than I expected.

My timeline has been scattered completely by the hiatus, but to keep you all updated, I plan to do three editing passes, to speed edit the novel. The first involves making color coded notes- what to cut, what to add, what to foreshadow or repeat later on- which is the majority of edits, because I wrote it all in one go, and came up with worldbuilding details and plot developments as I continued, which weren’t foreshadowed earlier. The second pass is attending to said notes, while skipping all the bits in between. The final edit is for language, flow and grammar. That will probably take the longest, because I’ll have to go through it word by word.

Before the third edit I’m hoping to have pre-orders up, and copies out to reviewers, with a finalized cover, blurb, title, and oh yes- a pen name. After speaking to some sages, they told me that its best I use a pen name, because in the future it makes it easier to get traditionally published, which would be great since I’m concurrently shopping around my fantasy novel Children of the Pantheon.

So that’s me, that’s whats up. This was a bit of a challenge to begin with, and life has gotten in the way and knocked off a solid two and a half weeks, so I’ve got to work harder to make up for it. Also, lost a bit of momentum, not going to lie, and its sometimes hard to make up with motivation. Drafting is easy, editing is…well…sometimes rather dull.

But that’s writing folks. Many writers have said the real write is in the re-write. Well let’s see.

So that’s me, and the project, and its definitely not over yet- I’m getting there, step by step. I’m halfway through the first edit as is, reckon it will be finished by mid-week.

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