When I posted my March update, I was nearing the end of an edit pass. It’s time to see what I’ve done since then.

Well, I’ve finished that edit pass, for starters. That was on the third of April. As I mentioned in the March update, I had some ideas regarding the sequels, which I was noting. After finishing the edit pass on #1, I opened the files with #2 and #3, writing those notes just below each chapter header so they are in visible places when I’d get to editing those.

Then, I took a reading break, folowed by a hiking break, and poof! Half of a month was gone. Just like that.

Before I go on, a question: have you ever procrastinated from writing by writing? I think I just did. My original plan was to search for the next beta reader(s) during the Easter holidays, which I then bonked to “after the holidays” and is on the waitlist since then. Curse my stage fright.

Instead, I opened the file with #2 and did what I delayed for four drafts in the case of #1: took to rewrite the beginning. As with #1, it sheared off some 10k words. And, when I was on that, I decided to go on with the rest and do a full editing pass. In that, I’ve realized I’ve likely learned something since I started in 2015 – and especially since I started reading the blog of several helpful people around here (You know who you are *wink*) in 2017. I am not as afraid to cut weak passages, rewrite sentences and dialogue, and other changed I spread through four drafts when it came to #1.

So far, I edited 27 chapters (of 76 originally, now it’s 23 of 72 after some mergning/cutting/shuffling) and dropped over 20k words (original word count at 233k, current at ~212k) despite adding a bit of detail here and there. Apart from cutting, I’m working on grammar and typos (which is disastrous in the first draft), fixing inconsistencies, and several other types of fixes.

So, my plans shifted a bit again – I’ll finish this edit pass/second draft and see what I’ll do next. That’s it from me for this time.