February 2025 in writing
Third Draft and Beyond It was a good February.
I finished my initial 3rd draft manuscript edit pass on the 23rd, likely the first time I completed a milestone before my soft deadline. I had thought the 3rd Point of View would take the longest, because I had massively altered its outline and arc, but it turns out I had already addressed most of those changes in draft 2.5.
January 2025 in writing
Third Draft The 2nd POV continues.
At the beginning of the month, I was going slowly; I had hit the section of Act Two that I had heavily refactored, so I was largely writing scenes from scratch. I finally caught up to the parts that had largely stayed the same, and I sped up significantly. And then, as of the past week or so, I’ve slowed back down:
I’m hitting Act 3 and the climactic scenes, which always slow me down.
December 2024 in writing
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.
Epic Fantasy word count
I’ve been stressing about keeping my dark epic fantasy debut at less than 120k words. Looks like I might not need to:
(From Thread Reader, which archived the thread from James Long (senior commissioning editor at Orbit)’s deleted Twitter account. Copying here because I don’t know if or when Thread Reader will go away.)
Quick thread on word count for debut epic fantasy novels, because there’s a load of terrible advice out there and it’s hard enough trying to write a brilliant book without worrying about whether your manuscript is too short or too long.
November 2024 in writing
Third Draft The third draft is going well.
I had forgotten just how much I had refactored the first POV. I ended up writing a number of completely new scenes. And I ended up throwing out and rewriting most of the words in the existing scenes because a) the structure has changed significantly, b) I’ve focused a bit more on including sensory details, and c) my prose has improved to the point that the existing words were painful to re-read.
antarctica
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