As of now, it’s three years to a day when I decided to give writing a try and started writing a sample chapter. Where has all the time gone? The fact that I am still going on feels like a personal victory, even though the finish line is still in distance. By my original plan, I hoped that today would be the release date for the first book but it needed even more time than I expected. So, what’s my progress for the last month and the outlook for the near future?

In the past few days, I was actually not writing that much. I managed to tie one loose end for the future third book and work a bit on its rough storyline but my time was more spent on reading than writing. Still, I’ve not been that idle, even if my activity was different.

I am trying to be more active on Goodreads, especially groups focused on self-published writers and gain some advice. I hope the feedback, small amount it might be, will help me in the future drafts when I am doing more polishing. I’ve also started working on the book’s early description and gained some feedback on that with hopes for more when I get to the beta stage.

Yes, beta stage, I was mentioning it a few times. It’s coming. I’ve done one quick pass with Grammarly the last days. It found ~400 issues of which half were false alarms (it struggles with possessive or plural forms of custom nouns, more so if they already contain an apostrophe) and the rest were usually problems with prepositions or plain typos.

I’ll probably do a quick read of the current draft, edit some parts and then do one more pass to find typos. After that, I’ll call it a beta version and start looking for beta readers. While I am bad with giving ETAs, I guess two to three weeks at most. At that point, I’ll probably share the early version of the book’s description and some other things – at this point, I’ve probably only said it’s an awfully long fantasy.

I’m not really sure about the form but it’s possible that I’ll do some descriptions of the main factions and/or characters over time while waiting for beta feedback. I actually have articles about three characters pre-written and at least rough idea how would I do the part that would introduce the factions.

So that’s my current plan. As I mentioned at the start, I am behind the original one, made when I knew little about the journey I was to take. I am more and more reluctant to give even rough ETAs but at this point, my best guess would be Q2/2019 for the final version of book one.

So, that’s another writing update. The next one is coming roughly in a month again; I might weave some other writing-related posts between that. Feel free to comment if you feel like having something to share.