I’ve reached another major milestone. The first beta draft (sixth draft by my own weird numbering) was completed some minutes ago. The largest changes were massive cuts in the early parts (something I wrote a blog post about a few days ago), the later parts being mostly rewording of sentences and other such smaller changes. Because I did major grammar pass between draft 5.4 and the sixth draft, this draft’s grammar pass was quite fast (it seems I’m learning something in this regard as well, hooray).

So, what’s next?

I’ll give the updated version to the people that were my ‘alpha testers’ and my first beta reader. In the meantime, I’ll play some games (World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth launching just in a few hours) and try to weave in the fifth book of ‘Chronicles of the Black Gate’ series after the two-week break from reading caused by my work on the beta draft.

I guess that by the end of the month or the beginning of the next one, I might try to find more potential beta readers in the few Goodreads groups I am a member of, though I’m not decided yet on the exact timing. Anxiety/stage fright is still a thing – as is the feeling that anyone reading will be like “what the hell is this?”.

I’ll also give some more details soon, this time for real. I have some of them prepared but still deciding what exactly to share at this stage (as the final version won’t be ready sooner than spring 2019). I’ll most likely give some details about genre and such + show some sample(s).

So, that’s my quick update. See you next time!

In the last post, I looked back on how my (lack of) ambition changed since the first ideas to the moments I was actually writing.

Now that I am doing the finishing touches on the sixth draft which is to be the first beta draft, I decided to look back on the individual drafts and the story’s state in them.

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I’m now quite close to having the beta draft complete (more on that in a few days) and start looking for the first beta readers and so I’ve decided to make a post that’ll look on how I saw the potential finish line, so to say. It surely changed over the years, the question is: how much?

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As of now, it’s three years to a day when I decided to give writing a try and started writing a sample chapter. Where has all the time gone? The fact that I am still going on feels like a personal victory, even though the finish line is still in distance. By my original plan, I hoped that today would be the release date for the first book but it needed even more time than I expected. So, what’s my progress for the last month and the outlook for the near future?

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Backstories. Details that make the story and the characters more likely by revealing bits that happened in their past or even before and tie in into the present. Something that makes the story more complex.

Something I feared for all those years before I gave writing a try – and even the first years. How can I, who has nothing but an idea, make a story complex enough to stand a chance?

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It’s getting close to three-year-anniversary since I started writing. It brought me to think a bit about how it started and how it went and to see how I changed in that regard. Doubt is still pretty much constant companion yet it is more often accompanied by hope. I hope that during those three years, I learned something and that each draft is better than the previous one.

Now, where I see the changes?

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I think I’ll never be a planner when it comes to writing. When I was writing my May update, I was going through the first draft of #1 on a quick edit pass mostly aimed at some typos and obvious issues, as well as to just get the story back into my head and make notes about possible continuity issues between #1 and #2 so I could have a look at them when preparing the beta draft of #1.

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