Progress Report February ’19
Two months into the new year already and the new trilogy is rapidly coming together…
A Little Hatred is now copy-edited, so finished apart from the final proof-read, and some advance copies are already in the hands of authors, reviewers and other lucky persons, including translators in a few languages. The book will be out in September in US and UK in hardcover, ebook and audiobook.
Meanwhile, a second draft of the second book in the trilogy, The Trouble With Peace, has now gone off to editors on both sides of the pond. There was a fair bit of work to do to that book. I really smashed through the first draft as fast as I possibly could, which was the right thing to do, I think, but meant that a few events, plot lines, character movements were a bit skeletal, and needed some fleshing out. Every point of view needed at least one significant extra scene, plus a couple of major new chapters, which meant the whole thing got some 25,000 words longer in this round of revision – very unusual for me, usually I cut some, add some, and end up around the same. Still, it was the book that needed the most serious work, and I’m a lot happier with it now.
Then I read through the third book, The Beautiful Machine, just to get a sense of where it’s at and how much work might need doing. Generally when I’m writing a book my first draft gets a lot better towards the end as I work out where I’m going. So it proved with this trilogy as a whole. By the time I was writing those final parts I knew the characters and where they were headed, so most of this final book’s already looking pretty good. The usual work of tidying, refining, and replacing the bland with the specific and the detailed in all kinds of ways but I think it’s only the last quarter of it that needs major work. I slightly mismanaged a plot line at the end, so a character had to move about a lot after the main climax – all a bit lumpy. I’ve now worked out a more elegant way of doing it, I think, which has the added advantage of bringing all the central characters back together right at the end so we can take stock of how they and their relationships have changed. More effective and climactic in all kinds of ways, I hope…
I’d forgotten how much work is involved in putting a book out there. Briefing art and interviews and videos for the sales conference and etc. Not that I resent it – it’d be crazy to put years of work into writing something but not the extra few days into giving it the best chance to succeed – and I’m actually really enjoying the thought of getting a new novel out there after a fair hiatus. But you forget how time-consuming it can be. Plus I’ve got a couple of little side projects that need some attention. Which means progress on the trilogy may be a little fitful over the next couple of months. But then we’re very much in the home stretch, I hope. Looking back at the blog it was September 2015 when I first started giving this series serious thought, so we’re coming to the end of a long old road…
Next thing will be a second draft of the last book, with a particular eye on sorting out that final section. Then I guess send it to editors so we can consider all three as a series, make any necessary changes to books 2 and 3 together. Then it’s 3rd draft of those two, trying to get more richness and detail into character, setting and language, which’ll take a while. Still, my guess is that by the time A Little Hatred comes out in September, the whole trilogy will be very close to complete.
Better start thinking about what I’m doing next, I guess…
