Progress Report

Hooray for snow days!

Amelia had a friend over and they spent the entire day outside playing in the snow. Which gave me loads of time to work on Child of the Knight. I finished revisions on almost four chapters today, bringing me up to chapter thirty. Ten to go.

Revisions means that I am making story corrections to make certain that all three story lines mesh with each other. So far, so good.

Challenges:

Names- wow, there are a lot of them. Minor characters mostly. When I wrote the manuscript I used XXX, YYY, ZZZ as a filler for people I didn't feel like naming at the time. There are a lot of people getting names right now. I have a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them.

The mercenaries are Idorians. No big deal, except in the first draft of the novel they were Saladorans. Now I have to change 90% of my "Saladorans" to "Idorians", but can't do it universally as there are still plenty of Saladorans in the novel. An added challenge is that Idorians don't speak Saladoran when they talk to each other. I've had to make up a new language for those times when they speak with each other.

She knows what? With three points of view, I have to keep track of which characters know what piece of information. Hadde doesn't know everything Maret knows.

How many arrows? Jeez, keeping track of inventory is a much bigger challenge in this book. I can't tell you why, but it is.

What's next?

Ten chapters of revisions. The pace is getting faster as I get to more recently written chapters.

40 chapters of spell check and grammar fixes. Whew... I turned off spell check when I wrote this one. I didn't want to be bogged down with little details. I thought by turning off spell check I would write faster. I think it worked. I can't wait to see what happens when I turn spell check back on.

Correcting grammar... not my strong suit. I'll do the best I can and hope I'm not too embarrassed by what my critique partners discover. 

Overall I am very pleased by my progress right now. I've blown every timeline I've put out there, so am loathe to try it again.

So I'll do it anyway....

Revisions finished: Soonish. Before the new year.
Get critique back from critique partners: When they get it done.
Second round of revisions: After that.


Best,

Matt