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 [!
April 2025 in writing
Fourth Draft progress I finished the fourth draft’s initial manuscript pass, where I updated the scenes with my notes and rewrites from my third draft read…I think having a hard deadline made me way more productive than anything else. I don’t yet consider the fourth draft finished, but I’ll finish by the end of May :) Developmental Edit I made a serious push to find a developmental editor in April, especially since they tend to be booked out a number of months.
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