Rom Tar Fourth Draft

Wanted to make a quick post to start the New Year, and provide an update.

I finished the fourth draft of Rom Tar last month, after three months of hemming and hawing and making various edits from the copious "Things to Remember" list that I maintain as I edit and re-read the series. I use this list to make sure details and events stay consistent across books. Like when I re-read The Distant recently, there were some details I totally forgot about, and wanted to mention again in Rom Tar. So I have my "Things to Remember" list for that.

I also spent a lot of the last two months fleshing out a huge timeline for events before and after The Hope of Memory, so that the additional history presented in Rom Tar makes sense, and to pave the way for future expansions of the story, if/when I decide to do that (looking more likely every day).

The fifth draft of Rom Tar will be my "audio" draft. This is where I read the entire book out loud and correct wording and dialogue that sounds wrong. I started doing this with Wilders and it's very helpful to identify those trouble spots.

I didn't participate in NaNoWriMo as I alluded to back in October. It was more important to finish the fourth draft of Rom Tar.

A New Novel

However... I have started writing a new novel that has been brewing for the last year. Enough of the outline and notes have been written, so I finally stopped putting it off and set finger to keyboard. It will be a shorter novel, perhaps half of one of The Hope of Memory. And I'm not writing this one longhand, I'm typing it up.

The book is called Hop Limit and it's about the afterlife. I would like to try and publish this one professionally... might be a little easier to do so with this one versus The Hope of Memory.