Endings and Beginnings

Book four is officially done! The rough draft, in all its unedited glory, has been pushed to the side. As is my usual routine, it will be glanced at in September/October, but otherwise, won't see the light of day until book 3 is with my beta readers or my editor. Book four came in at 107k which is a whale of a book for me. I expect editing will be frustrating as heck as well. Fortunately, that is a problem for future me, so I can safely ignore it. 

Instead, I'm working on book three. Now, the third book came in at 102k when I first opened the document. Fortunately, a lot of that was notes and alternate chapters. See, a lot of my writing process is just me throwing spaghetti at a wall until my mind connects the dots. So, if you were wondering why there was a sudden crab hunt in Hunter's Gambit, I can say that it wasn't planned from the beginning. Instead, I knew what my characters were going to find when they got there, but didn't know how they were going to find it. So, I started writing that chapter and stared at my computer wondering why I was writing about crabs until my mind connected the nodes in my mind. Alternate chapters pop up when I finish a chapter and realize that its bad and I hate it or (more commonly) that the story was being told from the wrong POV and needs to be rewritten. 

So, the good news? Book three is already down to 92k. That's with just easy edits, removing notes, chapters that I'd already known I was going to have to get rid of eventually and that sort of stuff. Some of my chapters that seemed to not fit at the end of book two have been added to three and I have already gone over it once, putting things in order. My next edit is one where I go through and I really look at my plot. I've already found two chapters that are going to be deleted and another seven that will require complete rewrites. While this seems like a lot, its actually less than I was expecting. Between changes made to book two and now knowing where book four is going, I would have been surprised if there were less than that. 

Honestly, what I'm surprised at most this time around is how easy it is to see things like chapters that can be deleted. Knowing that I need parts of those chapters, but not there and not alone, really helps me to figure out how to tighten my writing. Its my hope that figuring this out at this stage will also make my editing go way faster. I haven't hidden the fact that I'm very new to this, which means that I'm still figuring out how to work best and how to speed up so that I can get these books out to you faster.