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! He’s overall impressed with my book. He loves the 2nd POV, which I had restructured and rewritten multiple times to try to get the story right. He likes the 3rd POV quite a bit too; I had struggled to find the core of that storyline through most of the first three or four drafts.

…but he hates the 1st POV. Enough that he had to force himself to not skip those chapters.

After some discussion, we realized I might fix the worst of the issues by cutting a pivotal side character that provides a central through line that anchors the entire first POV arc.

I’m more than ok with this. For one, they were mainly a plot device. By giving them more screen time, I crowded out other story arcs, pushing them to the background. And I’m no stranger to massively restructuring and rewriting large chunks of my novel; I’ve chosen to do so five, six, or more times?

So I’ve spent a large portion of June surgically removing this character from the outline. I’ve had to promote other story arcs to drive the story, bringing other characters to the forefront. I’m not done, but I’ve made good progress and I have a good idea where it’s going. I want to finish this refactored outline before I get my developmental edit back. Hopefully both sets of changes work together.

Tooling

I’ve improved my multi-book tooling, to support both my future book brainstorming and my POV 1 restructure.

I’ve also significantly updated my neovim config. I started using checkmate, telescope-words, flash, and lualine; and I switched to the community fork of obsidian.nvim and submitted a patch (with a typo, oops!) to fix a longstanding papercut.

Beyond this, I’ve been improving my ergonomics. I changed my mechanical keyboard layout to reduce my finger movements. I’ll leave that for a separate blog post.

Plans for July

My primary tasks for July:

• Keep brainstorming future books, transcribing my previous brainstorming notes, and updating my book 1 todos to support those storylines;
• (hopefully) finish outlining my refactored POV 1;
• and read and absorb my developmental editor’s critiques and feedback when I get it.

Stats

Draft 5, as it stands today:

Manuscript markdown files: 96
Manuscript words: 162243
Total markdown files: 473
Total words: 445468

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
End of May 2025:       1068 beats, 67 arcs, 96 scenes
End of June 2025:      1073 beats, 68 arcs, 96 scenes

Draft 5 POV refactor wip (the total files and words are shared across manuscripts):

Refactored manuscript markdown files: 0
Refactored manuscript words: 0
End of June 2025:      1122 beats, 72 arcs, 100 scenes