Two hundred and eighteen changes

On 21 August I wrote here that the book was finished. Since that post the chapters have been changed two hundred and eighteen separate times. That is the gap between calling a thing finished and it actually being finished, and everything below is what has been filling it.

I set myself a schedule I could not really keep. The work happens every day, in the evenings, after a full-time job has had the rest of it. Into those evenings goes the editing and the rewriting, keeping each character's voice apart from the others so nobody drifts into sounding like everybody else. Turning the manuscript into an ebook a shop will actually accept. Getting the advance reader copies together and out to people. The shop paperwork, one retailer at a time. The social posts, written, checked against what has not been said yet, and sent. All of it is mine. There is nobody else in this to hand any of it to.

A model does a real part of that list well, and where it is used and where it is not is written down on its own page here. It is good at spotting what I cannot see any more: a word I have used four times on one page, a chapter's voice drifting off true, a construction I keep reaching for when I am tired. It stops being useful the moment the question is not what is on the page but why a scene is not working, or whether you will believe a choice a character makes deep into the book. For that, the only thing that has genuinely helped is reading how other writers solved the same problem, most of it craft advice picked up from author accounts on Instagram in whatever gap the evenings leave.

The word count is the bit I would change first if I could. I went too free with it and I do regret it, not as a performance of modesty but because I can see exactly where the extra length sits and could have caught it far earlier. What I do not regret is what the length bought. This book had to lay a foundation wide enough to carry the two that follow it, and everything I have planned for them is already sitting there on the page, waiting for me to reach it.

So two things change for the second book. Time, given to it properly and in advance instead of scavenged from whatever evenings are left over, which is why it is planned for 2027 and not sooner. And a stricter word count, set and held from chapter one rather than discovered to be far too generous after sixty-three of them. That second one is going to fight me the whole way, but we will see!

Pantheon and Perpetūra are both worlds I would rather keep coming back to than finish and shelve. I built them for myself first. I would love them to be worth your time as well, whoever you turn out to be.