Progress Report September ’17
Look at me with my regular bi-monthly updates. Don’t get used to it, is my advice…
I have now, I’m delighted to say, finished a first draft of the third and final part of the second book in my work in progress trilogy. So two books down, one to go. That means I’ve planned, written and lightly revised this second book in around six months, which is totally record time for me, especially given it’s around the 175,000 word mark. Don’t get too excited, though, there’s a lot of work still to do to these two, and when I’ll get started on the third is hard to say.
The original plan with these books had been to do something similar to what I’d done with the First Law, way back before I was a published – let alone a full-time – author: take my time on each chapter, live with the characters, rewrite a lot and develop the voices at leisure. In practice I’ve done the exact opposite, dashed through two books worth of rough draft leaving a lot of mess and doubt in my wake. But I think that’s left me with a strong framework and a good idea of where I’m going. Now I feel the time has come to go back and sharpen things up, read it through and think about it, smooth off those character arcs, get the characters and their voices a bit more defined, introduce secondary characters in the right places, build up some sub-plots and prune out others, and just generally add some edge. Who knows, I might even enrich the setting a little while I’m at it. Meanwhile I can do some reading, soak it all up, let it marinate, develop the endings, and hopefully come to that third book with a diamond-edged idea of what I’m doing and two books that are a lot closer to completion.
How long this process will take, especially with a lot of other stuff going on, it is hard to say. But I will try to keep you informed…
