Most patient and dedicated Supporters,

I am happy to let you all know that the third draft has gone to my beta readers. I’m expecting their feedback to come back in about two weeks(ish?). From there, provided that everything goes well, I want to send the manuscript to Inkshares within a month.

I realize there’s a lot of "if" in this plan, but my goal is to get this book into the production process by early July at the earliest. My dearest hope is that your patience will be well-rewarded and that once you hold your copies of Lucky in your hands you will find that the wait has been worth it.

More news coming soon. As always, a galaxy of thanks for all of you.

Sincerely, Webster

Greetings hexers,

Dear friends and followers,

It’s been a while since my last update. As I’ve said, it’s mostly a waiting game right now. Things are beginning to move, however: Inkshares has me reading up on various works of writing theory and working together with a few other authors to share and learn from each other. This is in preparation for the developmental edit round, perhaps so we’ll understand better how stories work and be better able to handle the developmental edits. It seems like a lot of additional effort, but I guess it’s in the interest of putting out a quality product ... and, perhaps, to groom a stable of talent? Does that mean they want me to write a sequel?

You know you want me to.

I’ve also been busy with another writing project, for Choice of Games: that’s been taking up all my attention for the past several months. I just submitted the completed draft for that project yesterday; it’s very exciting, and I expect there will be a lot of developmental edits on that front as well.

Looking around (because I can now afford to be distracted again)  a couple of works here on Inkshares have definitely caught my interest.

First off, there’s "The Rise and Fall of Gods and Housewives", by Zachary Sergi. Apparently the ancient mythological gods are alive and well, incarnated as ... reality show housewives? If that premise doesn’t grab you, I don’t know what will. Sergi is also the author of the highly successful "Heroes Rise" series for Choice of Games, so this should be of additional interest to all those Interactive Fiction buffs among you.

And second, there’s "Lost in the Fog", by Michael Ostrowski. It’s a caper in which a down-on-his-luck journalist is recruited to steal a bunch of sculptures, only to have someone else beat him to it. And no, the people who recruited him don’t believe a word of it. I firmly believe that we need more madcap mystery capers in the world, and this promises to deliver.

For now, though, I’m going to sit back and relax. I see a lot of developmental editing in my near future, so I better grab my binge-marathons of "Masterchef" while I still can.

Hey Party People,

The fun book launch activities continue to roll. I’ve got a couple guest spots on podcasts coming in the next few weeks. I’ll update you more on that later... but today I wanted to direct your attention to the lovely folks over at Fanbase Press. A few weeks back, one of their critics posted this kind review of good ol’ Space Tripping:

http://fanbasepress.com/index.php/press/reviews/item/7629-space-tripping-book-review

I reached out to them and said "Thank you." Well, the site’s founder and I got to chit chatting and we decided to do a short interview for the site. It got posted today and you can check it out.....here:

http://fanbasepress.com/index.php/press/interviews/books/item/7711-fanbase-press-interviews-writer-patrick-edwards-on-his-debut-novel-space-tripping

Bye all my buddies!

March is over, and it was incredibly busy but rewarding. Work on Human Resources has continued at pace, with an important milestone being achieved.

Developmental Edit
I’ve been working with my developmental editor to turn the draft manuscript into something that will truly shine. It’s been hard work, but during the last month we reached an important milestone — we finished work on the change plan (completed the new outline) and I have now started the rewrite. I wrote a blog about the developmental edit process and reaching this milestone on my website. I’m now flat out writing every night, preparing a new version of the manuscript. There are numerous new scenes, a lot of changes to existing scenes, and writing them will progress at an uneven rate (as a general rule, new scenes will take much longer to write than updating an existing scene). However, I’ll keep you informed (and myself on the hook) by reporting progress as I go! The chart below shows the current status of the rewrite.



Cover design
Work is commencing on the new cover design! Inkshares have an amazing cover designer working on this for me. Right now he’s gathering information before producing concepts to work through. 

Schedule
We don’t have a firm production schedule for the book — this stage of the editing process is just too fluid. What I can tell you is it should be sometime (early) in 2018. It is unlikely to be January at this stage, but I hope we’ll get everything in order to get the book out during the first quarter. I’ll keep everyone informed as we progress — the further along the process we get, the more reliable the predicted release date will become.

Say hello!
Don’t forget to jump on my Facebook page and hit like. I’m also on Twitter and Instagram.