(Most of my tech blogging lives at escapewindow.dreamwidth.org.)
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August 2025 in writing
So much to do, so little time I finished nearly all of my draft 6 outline refactor, but progress has slowed to a crawl. I’m going to start writing and address the rest as I go. Ironically, mid-month I was champing at the bit to get to drafting. Now that I believe I’m ready, life has left me distracted and unfocused.
Part of this is the fundamental disagreement I have with my developmental editor that strikes at the core of the book.
July 2025 in writing
Manuscript progress In the first half of the month, I finished refactoring the 1st POV’s outline; I’m pleased with how it turned out. The story will be stronger for it.
In the second, I received my developmental edit back! Lots of great feedback here: some that I enjoyed hearing, others that I needed to hear. I took some time absorbing it and responding. We’ll discuss in the coming days.
36 key keyboard
I love my Voyager. But I noticed that it’s a little too noisy to use in the middle of a bunch of people quietly reading. Plus, while it’s fairly compact, it’s still larger than I need it to be. There are a number of keys I don’t use that much, especially the widest thumb keys, which are spaced out a little too far for my small hands. I could easily go with a smaller footprint keyboard and move certain rarely used keys to another layer.
June 2025 in writing
Manuscript progress This month I tried to keep my manuscript read-only to avoid diverging too far from my developmental editor’s draft.
Instead, I’ve been brainstorming future books. I’m surfacing changes to make in book 1 to set up future books, plus it’s fun to think about future storylines. I’m pretty far behind in transcribing these handwritten pages to my wiki, but I’m catching up slowly.
Also, I got beta reader feedback!
May 2025 in writing
Manuscript progress I had named my end-of-April milestone 4.0b1; I needed to do a read-through to catch any issues before completing the fourth draft. I finished that read-through in May, but the changes were extensive: a number of chapter and scene reorders, with a number of major scene rewrites. I retroactively renamed 4.0b1 to 4.0, and labeled my latest changes the fifth draft.
I submitted the fifth draft to my beta reader and developmental editor [!
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