It’s time for another monthly update on my writing progress. Even though it might not feel so for me at first glance, there was actually some.

Shortly after my last month’s update, I went for a four-day hiking trip where I obviously did not write. Then some other things demanded my attention in the early October and so I decided to take a shorter break. I got back to it in mid-October when I finally got some writing done.

The first part was continuing edits of the to-be book one. As of now, the edits reached chapter 11 and brought a message that feels good: chapters that went through rewrites in later drafts were in a better state than those with minimal changes since the start. Which should mean that I actually managed to learn something on the way, at least when it comes to sentence structure and things like that.

Another realization is that editing a single chapter seems to take almost as long as writing it. I guess the reason is that in the first draft, I don’t need to pay that much attention to some of the smaller things and can just murder the keyboard as the ideas come to me and take care of mistakes and typos later. Paying full attention to editing based on external feedback means that I have to look at each of the pointed out mistakes and each suggestion. It’s easy when it’s an obvious typo/grammar error as I just fix those without too much thinking.

It gets complicated when the suggestion is something slightly more complex. A suggestion that might, at first glance, look like a sentence structure problem might, in fact, be a misunderstanding between what I wanted to say and what the reader understood. I need to look at what I wrote and what the feedback was, then find what the problem was. If it truly is sentence structure problem, I’ll probably end up rewording the entire sentence. If it seems the reader understood it differently than I meant to, I’m likely to end up examining (and possibly rewriting) the entire paragraph to make sure it says what I wanted it to say without any double meanings.

Anyway, putting the musings about editing aside, there’s also some progress on the first draft of #3 where I am currently at chapter 49 (up from 42 at the last update).

I am also still thinking about the next things I could hint about the story. That includes thinking about what the next sample might be (and when) and the possibility of sharing details about some of the characters and their background. It would probably touch the backstory that happens before book one (and is then mentioned throughout the trilogy) so I avoid spoilers.

So, that’s it when it comes to this monthly update. Feel free to comment. I’ll be back soon, possibly with some other storytelling-related post.