Of Estimates and Editing

A quick update my trilogy, The Hope of Memory.

A week ago I finally finished typing up the first draft of the second volume in the trilogy, Wilders, and I discovered that my word count estimate was way off. I had estimated the length at around 189K words, but in actuality it was about 148K... so I over-estimated by some 22%. Yikes!

In the future I'll need to adjust my estimates by perhaps 15-20%. I was worried about going over 180K, and had deliberately shortened some sections in the second half of the book because of that... but it seems there was no need to, and now I have the leeway to expand it slightly. There are a few things I do need to add - I have a full page of notes regarding edits - so I'll do that once The Distant is complete.

Oh, and for the next book, Rom Tar, I think I'll type up the text as I go, perhaps after each notepad. It's tiring typing the entire thing up at once.

One More Time

Speaking of The Distant, I'm now working on the 4th draft edit in earnest. Now that Wilders is complete, I feel more confident doing a true edit. This will be my last line edit... and there are a few parts that I'm going to cut, as they are simply no necessary now. I'll be able to get this done fairly quick; at 2 chapters a day I'll be finished in no time (currently there are 37 chapters).

Anyway, once I'm finished with that, I'll take a break from it for a few weeks, revise my outline for the final book, Rom Tar, then come back and read it one more time before finalizing for release. Which will be nice, considering that I started the first draft of this book way back in 2003. Yes, it's been kicking around that long.

I could keep going over it and revising here and there ad infinitum, but there are many different ways you can say the same thing, and in the end you just have to pick one and go with it. As long as it tells the story the way I want it told, I'll be happy with it.