I’ve been writing but have also been lazy with the writing logs lately.

I’ve ‘finished’ about 40-45% of the third draft. Chapters 1-8 are completed for one of two protagonists. I was working on Chapter 9 today. Chapter 10 is already done (it was the only chapter in the entire manuscript that was nearly perfect on the first try though I still need to change some small things). Chapters 11 and 12 need to be mostly rewritten from scratch so there’s still some work to do, of course (but at least I have an outline which helps tremendously).

The other protagonist has chapters that will need extensive rewrites, too, but not as many.

After I’m finished with that I need to do what I call draft 3.25 which is basically re-reading the manuscript and sort of massaging it, making it cleaner, finding any inconsistencies I missed in 3.0, adding a bit of flavor I forgot to add, etc – nothing major.

At my most optimistic outlook I can have the manuscript sent out to beta readers by the end of March.

Part of what’s taking so long is editing is way harder than I thought it’d be. I thought editing would be the easy part since ‘hey, the story is done already!’ but it’s significantly harder than just writing on a blank page. Chapter 7 took me almost an entire day because I realized it was structured badly despite the actual stuff happening in the chapter being good/important to the story. I also realized some parts of it were sufficiently important that I needed to show them, not tell them.

On an unrelated side note I’d like to do more entries on here that aren’t writing logs I just can’t find the time.