Figured I should make my posts more eye-catching with images.

Anyways, I’m happy to say that after a lot of chopping and major rewrites I’m about done with my second draft of my newest novel (tentatively titled ‘Catalyst.’) Most of it was fixing the pacing issues and story problems pointed out by my beta reader, as well as linking plot points together better and making some of the climax points more interesting. So that’s another step forward.

It’s strange how editing just seems to make the book longer. When I finished my first draft the novel was 168k words, and you would think that in editing I’d be cutting scenes and rearranging things to knock that number down. But while I did do a lot of cutting of unnecessary sentences, and shortening dialogue to make it feel more natural, and axing entire scenes that added nothing to the plot, a lot of my major rewrites somehow added even more words, to the point where my draft is now almost 179k words. Which isn’t terrible for fantasy. The issue is more if the story is interesting enough to keep a reader hooked that long, and I hope it is.

So from here I’ll probably be reading over the draft a couple more times to make sure nothing fell through the cracks during editing. Maybe get another pair of eyes to look over it before I send it off to be proofread. But I’m that much closer to publishing now.