Yo sé. Yo sé. The Progress Reports are late. That’s our thing. It’s cute. It’s endearing. There hasn’t been a crazy amount to report on in the last month, but I feel obliged to update nonetheless.
The First Casualty will be back from it’s voyage to line edits in the early-middle part of September. I don’t anticipate the process of going through the editor’s notes and making changes to take anywhere near as long as the developmental edit, but you never know until you know. On top line edits, I have two scenes to rewrite and an idea or two floating around my noggin, but I’ll wait for my call with the editor before tackling any of those. At a point you’re not making the novel better with changes, you’re just making it different, and I want to make sure I haven’t crossed that threshold. Artwork for TFC continues apace as well, including an early draft of the world map that was cool to see. It’s been pretty amazing to see how far everything has come, below are some notes from my first ever submission of my first ever draft to my writing group. That version got completely torn down and started from scratch after somewhere between 30K-40K words.
I’m still chiseling away at the other projects. I’ve restarted work on TFC’s sequel, The Ruins of Discord. This process has just been going over the 18,000 words already written and applying the lessons learned from TFC’s developmental edit. I imagine I’ll be doing something similar after I’ve worked through TFC’s line edit. I’m really happy with where this one is heading and think it’ll be better than TFC, and in my unbiased opinion that one is damn good itself. For TRoD I’m promising the same tone, but with more betrayal and politicking, and one can never have enough of that.
¡Salvame! progress has stagnated for its draft, but I’ve hammered through some finer details in its outline. It’s only sitting at ~1,200 words, but it might be the project I’m most excited about of the three. I think being able to go back and forth between ¡SM! and TRoD while drafting will be good for both of them.
Unfortunately, reading has been a tougher go as of late. I’m still working through Wolf Hall, and whiles it’s brilliantly written, it hasn’t quite grabbed me yet. I’ve only made it through an abysmally small portion of the work, so I’m sure this has more to do with Qwame than it does the previous Booker winner.
As for my personal life, I was able to spend last weekend in Chicago with friends from college, which always rejuvenates me, even if it’s resulted in me committing a month to sobriety for the second time in a row. Some other very exciting stuff is brewing in the stew, but I’ll wait until they’re a touch more realized and on-track before sharing them. I’ll be back in October, with word of how September went.