I know – I didn’t post here at all after the first week, but I was so focused on the draft itself, I didn’t have the time or energy. Usually I give myself two months for initial revisions (and that’s what’s specified in my contract) but this book was already running late and I didn’t have that luxury.

It was a gruelling process, trying to revise a substantial novel in a month, but I got it done, finally handing in the draft to my editor Marc on Tuesday 7th May. He may still want a few tweaks before it goes to the copyeditor, but it’s basically complete as far as I’m concerned. If I got hit by a bus next week, the book could still go out and I’d be happy at the result. Well, not the being dead or incapacitated part, but you know what I mean.

At first I was so relieved to have hit my deadline—and so mentally drained—that I was just glad to have it done and out the door. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I started to feel a bit sad that I won’t be writing about Mal, Coby and friends again, at least not any time soon. Their story has come to (for me at least) a satisfying conclusion and I’m ready to move on to new things. In any case it’s not over yet; there’s copyedits to check and the book release itself to look forward to, and even sooner than that—the cover reveal! Watch my main blog for more news on that, very soon

Bit of a journal hiatus last month, as I was analysing the plot and working out fixes, so I didn’t really have anything to say that wouldn’t be spoilers. Now I’ve had feedback from my beta-readers and my editor Marc, so I can finally knuckle down to the rewrites!

This first week has been slower than I hoped – despite taking time off work, I’ve only managed one or two chapters a day. The first three chapters went particularly slowly, but I think that was a combination of post-con exhaustion and the fact that the opening of any book requires a lot of care. Although I don’t expect new readers to pick up the series at this point, Book 3 needs to refresh returning readers’ memories without getting bogged down in infodumps, and that’s always a tricky balancing act. Add in some minor but fiddly plot illogicalities, and it required a lot of thinking.

Fortunately I hit a stretch of chapters that needed only light editing to bring them up to scratch, so I’m now on Chapter XI and thus almost a third of the way through the book. I can’t rest on my laurels, though – it’s back to the day-job today, which means fitting my edits into mornings, evenings and weekends. I’m hoping to finish by the end of April, then do a final spellcheck and polish before sending it in for copyedits. Then it will be onward to the next project!

This week I started work on the final draft of The Prince of Lies, the last volume in my Elizabethan fantasy trilogy Night’s Masque. It’s an emotional moment for me, as this is my last chance to wrap up the series in a satisfying manner, so I’m determined to make a good job of it. I’ll be getting feedback from my editor and beta readers later this month, so right now I’m focusing on analysis and preparation.

First up has been the read-through. As per my usual process, I outputted the manuscript to PDF, loaded it onto my iPad and read it in iAnnotate, a great app that allows me to mark up the manuscript almost as easily as if it were paper. What I’ve got out of it so far is:

1. Overall the book isn’t too bad – it needs work, but it’s a long way from being a train wreck, thank goodness!
2. The beginning and end are pretty strong, but the middle feels a bit fragmented and inconsistent
3. The downside of working in Scrivener is that it creates a tendency (in me) to think of each scene in isolation, so the transition between scenes can sometimes be jarring (though that’s a pretty easy fix)

It’s still going to take a bunch of hard work to make it shine, but it won’t (I hope) require major structural revisions – it’s more a matter of strengthening what’s there and making it smoother and more consistent. Next step is to write out index cards and start analysing the hell out of all the plot and characters arcs…

…and an epilogue!

Yes, I finally finished the second draft of The Prince of Lies yesterday. I’m not going to say too much about it here, as I intend to post on my main blog and don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll just say for the record that the last few chapters still had a few surprises in store for me. The biggest one was a revelation that put a new slant on events, so that will need foreshadowing in the final edit pass!

As a result of this new perspective I ended up discarding my intended Chapter 35 with its new scenes. It briefly looked like I would be down a chapter overall, then I read the remaining scenes and discovered just how fragmented they were – in my rush to get the story down on paper, I had jumped ahead to the bits I was most certain of, leaving massive gaps in the story flow. Hence I decided to split the final chapter into two so that I could add the missing scenes without it becoming horrendously long. I fear it may still be a bit rushed, but at least it isn’t a train wreck now!

Final word count: 123,488

Material discarded: 26,705 words

So at least I seem to be getting more efficient at writing early drafts!

Once again I’ve been too wrapped up in the process of writing to stop and blog about it – or more likely too annoyed by the slow rate of my progress to want to talk about it.

These past few chapters have been tricky, in that I had one side of the story pretty well nailed but the other was distinctly shaky (and mostly unwritten). There was thus a lot of new material required, and then I kept stopping and reshuffling the scenes to try and get the maximum dramatic impact out of the revelations – when you can see an event from both sides, the order of scenes becomes crucial if you want to build suspense. I’m not sure if I’ve nailed it yet, but it’s good enough for a first draft.

I’ve thus nearly completed the sequence of chapters before the finale, so I guess you could say I’ve just about finished Act Two – and Act Three is suitably short. Now to re-outline the last few chapters and try and bring this book to a satisfying conclusion!

Another week of slow progress, followed by another weekend of binge-editing! Most of the scenes in these next few chapters seem to be pretty solid, but I needed to fix the narrative flow by restructuring the chapters and adding an extra scene or transition here and there to make it into a coherent story.

Chapter 21 was quite hard work as I’d moved a major plot event from here to much earlier in the book, but bridging that gap gave me an opportunity to deal with the fallout from Chapter 20 instead of plunging directly into the next bit of plot. Chapters 22-25 have been rather easier, though the timeline that seemed entirely logical during the first draft turned out to be a complete mess. When you look at the sequence of events and you can’t quite get your own head around the passage of time, you can be sure the poor reader’s going to be totally lost! Hence a bit of shuffling and the insertion of a scene or two that isn’t vital to the plot per se but (I hope) results in a clearer picture of what’s going on.

In summary, the editing might not be going quite as fast as I’d like, but I’m much happier with the way the story is turning out

I haven’t blogged about this draft in a while because to be honest, I wasn’t making progress. I got stuck on Chapter 16 for ages, and it eventually became clear to me that I wasn’t happy with the narrative flow of the preceding chapters. I wrote some new scenes that ended up being a new Chapter 17, clarified the run-up to Chapter 16 and was finally able to work out what needed to go into 16 in order to move the story forward. That done, it was straightforward to edit Chapters 18-20 and complete Part One of the book! Admittedly Chapter 20 did give me a bit of trouble and I wasn’t able to edit the whole thing on Sunday as planned, but it’s one of those plot turning points that absolutely has to be right if the rest is going to work.

Now I’m moving onto Part Two, which takes place several years later. I’m going to try and do a chapter a day for the rest of the month, but I’m not sure how feasible that’s going to be. Not impossible, but I’ll have to spend practically the whole of every weekend on it as well as a fair chunk of each weekday. Still, I’m feeling less hopeless about hitting my end-of-January deadline than I did a week ago

Owing to my difficulty in typing, I haven’t felt motivated to blog about my editing progress for the past couple of days. The good news is that I’ve been making progress nontheless, and am actually a day ahead of schedule now!

These last six chapters have been hard work in some respects, as I’d moved scenes around and changed my mind drastically about how one storyline should wrap up. On the other hand most of the scenes (apart from the end of said storyline) were pretty good and just needed some gaps filling in. There were still times when it felt like wading through treacle, but I’m past the worst bits of Part One now. I should be able to get the remaining four chapters done before the year runs out, and move onto Part Two in January. That’s when I’ll really have my work cut out…

Unfortunately my writing pace has been somewhat hampered over the last 48 hours – not by Christmas but by a minor back injury that makes it very painful to sit upright. It happened on Christmas Day, a result of vigorous hoovering of the living-room carpet followed by much bending over to build my Playmobil castle. I thus have to type lying down, which is not easy!

However I’ve soldiered on, and just finished Chapter 9. It required more rewriting than expected, as I had an unplanned fight scene that didn’t work out quite as anticipated. Or rather, the net result was the same, but it required the intervention of another character whose own scenes then needed rewriting. I also increased the number of bad guys, which means that victory takes longer and is more complex (my Muse tends to think small in the first draft, hence the second draft involves a lot of beefing up of incidents).

Anyway, I’m now halfway through this action sequence, and hoping to complete Chapter 10 today as well. I’m not going to be able to get ahead of schedule this week, as was my original plan, but I’d like to at least stay on track…

Chapter 8 concludes the current revised section; the first scene is the remainder of the brought-forward incident, then three new scenes build on that. Am enjoying the little details that have arisen from this new timeline – I just wish my Muse would do this on the first draft!

This section has also been rather Mal-centric, so I’m looking forward to switching to a new PoV for the next couple of chapters. Time for Coby to show what’s she’s made of!