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 May 26 :)

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. I eventually turned to Reedsy to submit requests for five quotes at once; I deemed Reedsy’s added service charge an acceptable expense.

I found five wonderful editors to request quotes from. It was a difficult decision between two of them, but I narrowed it down to one. I’m going to be sending my manuscript to them on May 26 [!!]

Once we set that hard deadline, it was easy to filter out all my to dos into “must do before May 26” and “can do after May 26” buckets.

Plans for May

My primary tasks for May:

• I’ll give the manuscript another read-through to catch anything glaring before sending it out.
• I have a number of fixes I want to make in the fourth draft.
• I want to improve my tooling to enable working in Word and markdown in parallel.
• I want to polish up my outline and outline-to-pdf tooling since I’m leaning towards sending a copy to the editor.
• I want to update my epub frontmatter since I’m sending an e-book to a beta reader for feedback.

I’m not supposed to touch the manuscript while the editor is working on it, though hopefully the tooling above will allow for two-way syncing. I have a list of tasks, including wiki gardening and fleshing out worldbuilding details, that I can do while the manuscript is out for edits.

Stats

I was pretty excited when I saw my word count slowly going down as I progressed through the fourth draft, but then it increased in the climactic scenes. Still, we’re just talking about the difference of a few thousand words. And I still have room under that arbitrary 175k soft limit for debut epic fantasies :)

Manuscript markdown files: 98
Manuscript words: 163454
Total markdown files: 484
Total words: 359634

The number of beats continues to shrink as I streamline my outline. They may go up if I start tracking relationship levels, questions/promises/reveals, and the like, as I’ve been threatening to do for so many months.

End of Draft 2.5:       958 beats, 65 arcs, 93 scenes
End of August 2024:    1088 beats, 70 arcs, 99 scenes
End of September 2024: 1804 beats, 70 arcs, 95 scenes
End of October 2024:   2139 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of November 2024:  2080 beats, 63 arcs, 95 scenes
End of December 2024:  2063 beats, 63 arcs, 97 scenes
End of January 2025:   2001 beats, 62 arcs, 97 scenes
End of Third Draft:    1865 beats, 63 arcs, 97 scenes
End of March 2025:     1630 beats, 65 arcs, 96 scenes
End of April 2025:     1203 beats, 66 arcs, 98 scenes