Another month passes and so it’s time to look back at my progress.

By the end of the April, I was doing a somewhat-unplanned editing pass on book two of my current project, and reached chapter 27. In the following days, I’ve finished the pass. The final result was some 60 hours of work time and 40k words gone. While around a quarter of it was reworking the intro (which I mentioned in the April update), most of it were small things – adverb culling, cutting sentences with little meaning, cleaning up dialogue, cutting ‘fluff’ and other edis that were in the scale of less than a sentence for most of the time.

Yet, they sent the total word count from 233k to some 195k.

When that was done, I took a short break from writing. Then, I took two days to do a full clean-up of the static parts of my (this) weblog, especially the parts related to my writing project. I’ve updated the sections that needed it, converted it all to the block system WordPress launched some time ago, added information about two (maybe three) characters and a few more small things that eventually amounted to a lot of time.

Then, I cleaned the spam folders, pre-wrote a few posts, edited the other pre-written posts I have prepared.

The largest major update to the static part was the character pages, where I added a list of related characters (with links, if these characters have their page already done).

With that done, I’ve made a few small changes to the current draft of #1 – one name change, two passages got some clarification, and I fixed a few random typos I’ve found.

I’ve also written the intro (pretty much a prologue) for what’ll eventually be a “book #0,1” looking into the past as these scenes are something I’ve had in my mind for a long time already so I’ve decided I might as well write them down. It took just a few hours and felt like a minor thing to do but then I looked at it from a different side and came to the conclusion that a 5200 words is not that bad for two days. Yes, it’s not as good as when I wrote the first draft of the final battle of #3 (~9,7k words in half a day) but not bad either.

I don’t know how much actual writing will be done in the next month. I’ve finally started looking for beta readers so my progress will be mostly dependant on how successful I am on that front. In the meantime, I might think about what I’ll need to change in all three books of the trilogy, especially in the first round of edits of #3.

As a side note, I’m also considering to go down from three posts a week down to two a week, most likely replacing the Tuesday and Friday ‘slots’ with a mid-week ‘slot’ while keeping Sunday posts as they are.

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So, that’s what I’ll share about my progress for now. See you next time.