Third Draft

Progress is slow but consistent. The holidays provided this month’s distraction. Our local dog park is temporary closed, so we now drive to a larger but further park, which eats up a large chunk of daylight, but most of the time seeing Rye that happy is the highlight of my day. And we’re getting ready for a very exciting January distraction :)

Finishing the First POV

The climactic scenes took a lot longer, as usual. The final five scenes of the first POV took nearly half of December to finish up.

I’m focusing more on quality than speed. This, along with the POV refactor, meant I was rewriting most of my scenes from scratch. I think this structure is mostly working, so subsequent drafts should be edits rather than rewrites.

I have read a handful of First POV scenes in PDF, marked them up, and edited the wording and flow of the scenes. I’m not entirely sure if I should consider this the start of a fourth draft, or polishing the third before sending it out to readers and editors.

Progress in the Second POV

I ended up keeping a number of scenes relatively unchanged in the Second POV, so I started off super fast. Nearly three scenes in a single day at one point.

But I refactored a lot of the middle scenes, which needed considerable rewriting and/or drafting from scratch. Then I hit a problematic scene that I had largely given up on fixing in Draft 2.5. I spent three days on it and now I suspect it might be one of the stronger scenes.

I’ve now finished 44 out of 97 scenes. At this rate, I’m going to finish the third draft (of all 3 POVs) in March. Progress is much slower than I want it to be, but I’m somewhat keeping up with my other chores, I’m not out of my mind with stress, and I’m pleased with what I’ve written and edited so far.

Plans for January

Keep on with what I’m doing. Hopefully I’ll nearly be finished with the third draft of the 2nd POV by the end of the month.

More news on our super exciting January distraction later.

Stats

I had held onto the hope that, even if I were writing new scenes and adding detail and color to the text, that the word count would go down, from nearly 140k to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120k-130k. Instead, it exploded to nearly 150k, and I’m not done adding.

Fortunately, I found this thread on Reddit. The original Twitter account seems to be deleted, but I found the thread on Thread Roll, and I archived it here.

TL;DR: per the senior commissioning editor at Orbit, debut epic fantasies can and should be between 125k - 175k before there are issues. Phew!

Manuscript markdown files: 97
Manuscript words: 149073
Total markdown files: 472
Total words: 436460

I found some more beats in my outline that either didn’t work or could be streamlined.

End of Draft 2.5:  958 beats, 65 arcs, 93 scenes
End of August:    1088 beats, 70 arcs, 99 scenes
End of September: 1804 beats, 70 arcs, 95 scenes
End of October:   2139 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of November:  2080 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of December:  2063 beats, 63 arcs, 97 scenes