Author's Quick Notes

Greetings! How are y’all doing? It was a lot of fun reading your comments in the character poll. I had many more plans for polls and stuff I wanted to do, but life—or better work—had other ideas. I know it must be an absolute shocker, but I underestimated how much work it would be to edit book 3 XD. 

I’ll ramble about the editing below for those who are interested, but first the important news. I sent in the manuscript for book 3 to my publisher for the first round of line edits about half an hour ago! :) There are still a few things to do, but 70% of it is not my work. You can’t imagine how glad I am to be finally done. And how excited to show you the final version. There were so many great scenes I had forgotten about and/or rewrote. It’ll probably take a couple months for the book to be out. I’ll tell you as soon as I’ve got a date!

After about 17 days of editing 12-14 hours a day, I’m a little dazed. So, Monday’s chapter will come out on Wednesday and possibly be back on track by Friday.

Okay, that’s the important news. Now, for the philosopher and general snoops who want to know more about what I’ve been up to, and what to expect when they’ll read the edited book 3. Buckle up! Here’s the brief summary of my past few weeks. 

So… It turned out book 3 was actually 96 chapters (89 after my edits). I don’t know why I was convinced it was 93; guess it had been a while since I scrolled all the way down the doc, but anyway… the process of editing it can be divided into thirds-ish of the book. 

• The first third of chapters was the roughest to get through. It goes from when Kai leaves Sylspring for Higharbor after the pirate raid to when he travels with Lou, Flynn, Ana and the twins to a Vastaire site and fights the sea serpent. The chapters here took about 4-7 hours to edit each on average. I had basically to rewrite them entirely and/or fuse them together to fix the pace. This is probably the third where you’ll see the biggest changes. Mostly, I’ve just rewritten what was already there, but there are also a couple of short new scenes, and much of the dialogue has been tweaked (cause it was cringe). Because yeah, third 1 was also the one where I thought the most times: ‘oh yeah, here I was really stretched thin and had no idea what I was doing.’ And ‘Sweet gods above! This line is so cringe. I want to dig myself a hole.’ 

Anyway, that was by far the longest and hardest section to edit. 

• The second third of chapters was… better. It goes from when Kai returns to Higharbor from the trip to when the Republic knocks on his door and ‘recruits’ him to investigate the beast accidents linked to the Vastaire. My writing definitely got better. This was also the slowest third of the book, where I’ve fused more chapters. They took about ~2-4 hours to edit each. Again, there were a few paragraphs that had no place being there and much to rewrite, but the prose sequence was mostly solid. Book 3 in general had less fluff to cut than I thought (it went from ~260k words to ~240k words in the end—counting the few thousand words that I’ve probably added).

• Finally, we reach the third-third of chapters, also known as the last third, the blessed third, and the ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve-finally-learned-to-write-half-decently-third. Like the name hints, this was the best and most solid section. It included all the actual investigation of the Vastaire after the Republic forcibly recruits Kai, till he gets trapped in the Hidden Realm with totally-not-a-megalomaniac, fairy god of high opinions, Zervathi. I liked this third quite a lot; chapters took ~2 hours each (probably because I was also half fried by this point). My edits were mostly rewriting awkward descriptions and tightening the action scenes. Not much else to say.  

Thus ends our journey through waaaay too many hours of editing (~180 just the last 3 weeks). After this, my publisher’s ‘editor’ will fix the typos I’ve surely added while rewriting scenes and my brother proofread the manuscript once. Aside from looking at the stuff they point out, my work is almost done, and I’m so glad for it. Can’t wait to show you the final version of book 3: Elydes - Whispers of the Isles

This is it, folk. I’ll see you on Wednesday with, hopefully, a fresh brain and a shiny new chapter as Kai tackles Raelion’s mid-term Trials (which will definitely go right, with absolutely no accidents and/or deadly dangers)

Drew signing off,

byeeeeeeee!