Another month passes and so I am back with a monthly update on my writing progress. With the last update, I mentioned that I’ve edited the first 11 chapters based on early feedback. It’s time to see what was done since then…

As my first beta was busy with his own writing, the moment I did what I wanted with a bit of work on #3, I started reverse-engineering his feedback to the point of trying to find what I was doing wrong and went through all the following text, cleaning sentence structure and trying to incorporate other useful tips I’ve seen mentioned by other bloggers (thank all of you!) as well as making a few cuts. The word count dropped steadily to some 185k words (compared to 235k+ early drafts).

According to my notes (and timestamp on emails), this ‘draft 6.2’ was done on 5th or 6th November. Since then, he’d sent me his notes for chapters 13-20 which I started editing already and will continue in the coming days.

In the meantime, I’ve asked an author I talked with on Goodreads for a targetted feedback on a specific small part of the story. As she’s a romance author, I’ve asked her for feedback on the romance subplot, giving her the appropriate excerpts to look on and gained some useful tips – which I then reflected on. I made some edits and notes as there are some things I’ll need to think about. One of them is considering how much detail to give it.

I am also thinking about the next stages. I presume that with the most obvious errors and issues fixed, I could actually start looking for more beta readers with the beginning of next years, asking for targetted story-based feedback. It’s something I’ll be pondering during the next month most likely.

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I’ll wrap it up at this. Next progress update will likely come as usual, around 20th the next month. Seeya for now.