Just back from the last leg of my “Fall Tour.” I feel gloriously pretentious saying that … “Fall Tour.” Now I get a short break before I try to hit some Christmas markets in the next month-and-a-half. I might not do as many as last year. That’s partly because I feel like taking a break, and partly because I don’t have time to take a break. Huh?
What I’m referring to is the impending deadline on Drawing Dead, the book that completes the “Opening Trilogy” of the Thomas Vale series. I’m supposed to have it on bookshelves by February 2nd, 2027, and that is 100 days from today. Tomorrow I plunge into the depths of the double digits … yikes!
Yeah, yeah, I know … it’s my own, self-imposed deadline. Which means I can break it if I have to, or want to. But I don’t want to, and so I’m hoping I don’t have to.
My current status: I still have about 25% of the first draft to finish. The fourth quarter, so to speak. But things aren’t as bleak as they seem, because I’ve finished the third draft of the first half, and the second draft of the third quarter. This time around, I’ve been back-editing as I go, a very different way of writing/editing than I did before. One more pass over the first half, and two more passes over the third quarter, and I’ll be ready to hand those off to my copy editor, the lovely Becka.
It took me nine drafts before my debut novel was ready, and seven drafts for the sequel. Looks like just six this time, which isn’t a sign I’m getting lazy. It’s a sign that I’m improving as a writer, and a lot of the mistakes I needed to correct the first few times aren’t happening anymore. Everybody’s first drafts are terrible, that’s just a fact of life for a writer. But my second drafts are much better than they used to be, and easier to improve later.
It’s evolution. Except that instead of happening over a quarter of a million years, it’s happening over a quarter of a million words (the total word count for the trilogy will exceed 250,000 by a fair margin). Another part of this evolution is that I’m no longer writing the entire book before I begin editing — I’m doing those things simultaneously now.
As I keep writing, I’m sure I’ll keep evolving. And improving too, hopefully. My readers will be the judge of that, ultimately.
This time it’ll be six drafts. The first draft is writing the story, and the second is fixing all the glaring mistakes (passive voice, continuity errors, dull descriptors, etc…). The third and fourth are mostly to tighten the prose, taking out unnecessary words and/or just finding better ones. Just two passes should be enough, whereas I needed more of them previously. Progress!
The fifth draft will be Becka’s copy editing pass, hopefully catching all the little mistakes and formatting errors I didn’t catch the first four times. And finally, the sixth and last draft is where I literally read it aloud, just to make sure the voice flows, changing a phrasing or two here and there just to make it read more smoothly. And then we slap a cover on it.
Which reminds me … time to start talking to Miblart, my awesome cover team. It’ll take them a month or more to do as good a job as they did the first two times, so it’s time to get moving.
It’s chaotic juggling all these pieces … but I love it!