Greetings all! I have actual substantial updates this time around. It feels great!
Let’s not beat around the bush here. I’m going straight for the throat and starting off with what you want to read. Draft 3(ish) of Soulformer book 1 is well under way! For those who have noticed, I’ve updated the home page to show progress on this draft which, as you can tell, is going pretty strong. So far, I’ve revised the prologue roughly through chapter 8, so I’m around 20% through the full book.
The first couple chapters were mostly surface level fixes. Better language, more effective description, etc. However, chapter 3 was the first big change. In previous drafts, I’d had some comments that a later Kinnick chapter felt a bit out of place and disrupted the flow of the book. After reviewing it, I somewhat agreed, though I still loved what the chapter provided for character development with Kinnick. With some of the plot/character updates I’m planning with Kinnick, the original chapter 3 felt too aggressive. So, what did I do to fix both problems? I switched them. Two birds with one stone and all that. I did have to do some rewrites to make it fit in the space, and it cascaded into edits further on, but I really like how it turned out. The flow works and makes much more sense with the chapter where it is now and I get to keep what (I think) is an important moment for Kinnick and for his character development.
The next portion, as mentioned above, was the cascading effect from the chapter 3 changes. I ended up splitting portions of the old chapter 3 and chapter 4 into two separate chapters and rewriting some of the events to match up with the changes in the new chapter 3. It all still worked out great and I’ve been having fun revisiting this work after taking a break and developing my writing style a bit more with other projects.
Other than those major changes, most of the edits I’ve been doing are cleaning up the language, removing unnecessary fluff, adding back in better descriptions and (hopefully) more realistic dialogue, among other things. There will be more substantial changes further on, but right now it’s just cleaning up what I already had and making it more enjoyable to read.
Like I said above, I’m finishing up chapter 8 right now. Most of the revisions were frontloaded this month, what with my excitement from the Futurescapes workshop, but I still want to maintain a good pace to get this draft done by this summer. At that point, assuming I’m comfortable and satisfied with where the story is, I’ll likely start trying to submit it to agents and start outlining and writing my next story idea. As I mentioned in last months’ post, the idea I’m particularly excited about is sci-fi horror and substantially different from Soulformer. I think it would be good to stretch my writing abilities and start on something that will take my mind away from fantasy and Soulformer in general.
Here’s to a productive month! I look forward to another update in May.