I wanted to thank each of you as well as say Hello to the new followers of A Distant State. I'm extremely happy with the pre-orders so far, but would love to see more to give it a chance to be printed. 

This past week was insightful. I finished reading the complete novel in it's current format (minus the last few chapters to be written), I've completed editing the first pass of Chapter 2 and prepared Chapter 3 for edits. Basically, I just print out the chapter on paper in a double spaced format to read and mark up with ink. I know that my edits won't be the final ones needed but it gives me a chance to proofread before passing it on to another set of eyes. 

Some high level to share - Chapter 2 sees the launch of the NACR Libertad happen as Castro says good bye to the crew and passengers. Chapter 3 introduces the main protagonist, Alexi Breliv, and his mentor, Bohdana Kuzma, as they prepare for the Rebirth Ceremony. 

When I've been writing, I've been listening to the playlist that I shared in the last update as it helps get me back into the same state of mind to try and stay focused on the setting. I'm putting thought into how I want the transition from current point of the written material to the ending that I'm envisioning for the novel. I'm also trying to formulate whether to keep this as a single novel or look at making it a trilogy. Once I make up my mind on that is how I will write the last couple of chapters.  

As this is crowdsourcing publishing project, if you could share with your friends to encourage additional folks to look at it and pre-order that would be great! I'm very appreciative of those that have pre-ordered and thank you again. 9 books pre-ordered only 741 to go in 70 days. 

Thanks for your support! Dylan

Wow. Thank you everyone for your support so far. There are seven pre-orders in less than twenty-fours hours and A Distant State is moved up to the funding status. 

So notes on how the project is going, I have finished reading the initial draft of the book and have some work to clean up in plot lines and character detail. I really needed a chance to re-read everything and thanks to an internet outage at home during the past week I was able to find the time to finish reading. This will give me a fresh perspective on the characters and where I originally had wanted them to go. Now, I can move forward with the edits for the chapters 2s to 14 and fix some of the discrepancies that I found. 

I found the original notebook that I had handwritten notes and ship layouts that was buried on a bookshelf from the past two years so I was going through that yesterday. 

Chapter 2 first pass on edits should be completed by this coming weekend and ready to post if the novel passes 100 pre-orders. 

As a special surprise to the early pre-orders, I created a Spotify playlist themed for A Distant State. The playlist is heavy on Dmitri Shostakovich, who was a Soviet composer that died in 1975. You will learn the reason for the heavy rotation on the playlist throughout A Distant State. There is also a mix of other popular songs from the 60s that is appropriate to what is happening during the novel. 

The Spotify playlist can be found at this link: https://open.spotify.com/user/dmcintosh24/playlist/7eky0AGuxHHL5aZOOlc4IM If you are not a user of Spotify, then you will need to create a free account to be able to listen. Sorry. 

If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to leave comments! I'd love to hear what you think. Keep spreading the word as well! Much like other crowd-sourcing projects, I need everyone's help. 

Thanks for believing in me and A Distant State!