Friends, we have an update!
Two days ago, I received my editor’s notes for my second draft of Tantalus Depths. He was impressed! The story is making serious progress toward genuine greatness. He said it will likely only take one more round of development edits before it’s ready to go to the copy-editing stage.
The last round of development edits I made took way too long. It took me months to get things just the way I felt they needed to be, and by the end of it I kind of just wanted to swan dive into a woodchipper. Fortunately, though, this next round of development edits won’t take long at all. I’ve gone through all of Matt’s notes a couple times now. There are way fewer of them than last time, and most of them are very simple fixes. With this last draft I had to fully rewrite four or five chapters from the ground up and ended up adding about 20k words to the manuscript as a whole. This next round of edits should be little more than tweaking sentences here and there, trimming a few out or adding a few in. I anticipate no significant multi-page rewrites for this one, so it should go a whole lot faster.
In fact *knocks on wood with all the might of Mjolnir* my goal is to finish this round of edits by the end of this week. I’m hesitant to put definitive timers on things these days, since every single step of this editing process has taken me WAY longer to do than I thought it would, but now that I have a better handle on how long it takes me to do this kind of work and knowing that the overall workload for this draft is way lighter than the last, I think one week is quite attainable.
Of course, there’s another reason to try and get this done that fast. As most all of you should know by now, I’m still trying to get Proteus funded. We’ve made slow but steady progress with that campaign, and as of right now it’s hovering at just a bit over 340 orders. We’ve almost reached the halfway mark with two more months to fund it.
Tantalus Depths comes first, though. That’s the book I started first, that’s the book that the most people have supported, and it’s the book people have already waited altogether too long for. So I’m taking a break from campaigning Proteus until I finish this draft of Tantalus Depths and send it in. Obviously I don’t want to lose more campaign time than necessary for Proteus, so hopefully that deadline helps keep me focused on getting this draft done quickly.
It’s going to be a busy week! I’m honestly looking forward to working on this draft, since I’ve already got some interesting new ideas to implement. I’ll send another update as soon as I’ve finished this draft and sent it in, so hopefully you’ll hear from me again really soon!
By the way…since I’m not going to be actively campaigning Proteus much this week, I’d be extra-extra grateful if a few more of you could support that book by giving it a pre-order or two while I edit Tantalus Depths. We can double our productivity that way and I’ll be at least a little less stressed out!
But not that much less stressed out. My body consumes stress for nourishment at this point.
