The novella is almost complete, and the novel is being reassembled after Beta reader comments.

Writing progress as of 25th June 2019.

I sent off the novel (the book that started me on this whole journey) to a selection of Beta Readers. I asked for some assistance in the BestSeller Experiment Facebook group and four kindly souls volunteered to read my work and offer their feedback.

Fortunately, they liked it! And they had some very constructive criticism, which will make the book stronger and the story better. The downside of this is that I’ve had to tear it apart and put it back together again, which is taking a while! I estimate about a month of solid work to get it into a form I can read through, and then probably much the same for a final spit and polish.

One of the most valuable lessons from this has been having my unique bad habits called out. It’s difficult to spot your own peccadilloes, but once they’re pointed out to you, they’re impossible to miss. In particular, I had my main character ‘seeing’ a lot of things (I saw a man, I saw the room, I saw…) and practically everyone and everything ‘seemed’ to be something, rather than just ‘being’ whatever it was. Removing those little things made a huge difference on their own, even before I got to the more structural editing!

As of today, I’m about 2/3 of the way through the edit, and I’m calling it Draft 2. One side-effect of this edit is that I’m reducing word count dramatically. I honestly thought I had written a book as short as it needed to be, but so far I’m removing around 50% of the words! A few major scenes have bitten the dust as they added nothing to the story, nice as they were. And a lot of filler, exposition that wasn’t needed and other fluff won’t be missed for a second.

My next blog post will be more information on the novella - and possibly even a tease of the cover!

Draft 2 is now 2/3 complete, 48,000 words.

Draft 2