Another month gone, which means I’m here with another monthly update. The good thing is that there’s progress which means I have something to write about in September’s post. So, without any more fluff, let’s get to it.

In my Last month’s post, I mentioned that my first actual beta reader finally got the draft only for me to realize that I’ll need to do some edits in the beginning. My plan was to wait for his feedback and then edit it.

If you’re reading my posts for a while, you can probably guess I did not wait for that.

Realizing they are needed and I’d do it anyway, I made those edits in two or three days and, with an apology for wasted feedback on three chapters that were rewritten, sent him the next version.

So, how’s the early beta going?

Good, I guess. At the time of writing this post, I’ve got feedback on the first 10 chapters and mad edits on the first five. He helped me to see some clumsily-written parts of weird combinations of words that were a mixture of influence from English and my native language. It’s now mostly rewriting sentences/paragraphs that weren’t clear or were understood differently than I meant them to be.

Is that all that’s going on?

Not at all. As I waited for the first bits of beta feedback, I kept working on the story going forward. The first draft of book three is now at 42 chapters and doing well. I’ve managed to find a way to deal with one of the subplots that I genuinely feared. I made several lesser characters a bit more connected to the story. While I don’t know all the specifics (I usually make stuff up as I go), I have decent ideas where the next chapters will go – and thus the buildup to the final showdown.

If everything goes well, the first draft of the third book could be gone in a few months and I could then focus on editing and polishing the trilogy while pushing the first book closer to release as I’d look for more beta readers.

Who am I kidding?

Realistically, I don’t think I could leave the creating part be and just edit. I’d probably at least start thinking out the details for the next project – the two prequel novellas. The first thing would probably be to look at it and weight the pros and cons of keeping them separate vs. merging them into a single book, even if it was on the shorter end.

What about the promised sample(s)?

They are pretty much chosen. The prologue will get one or two more quick looks for some possible errant typos. The others are a bit further down the story so I’ll need to decide whether to show them in version 0.6.0 (the one given to my beta) or wait for his feedback and possible edits (which I call 0.6.1).

In short: I can see showing the to-be-updated prologue in one to three weeks. The others will likely need to wait a bit longer.

So, that’s my September writing update. Next one coming in a month, as usual, unless I have something big to share and an urge to share it sooner than that.

See you next time. Feel free to comment.