Progress Report 2024 Week 37

I vaguely remember saying something about this before, but going too long without writing new content takes a lot out of me. I’m putting The Sword of Sirius though its final draft. All three manuscripts. Which takes a lot of time. Time that I’m not writing new content. How’s that going, you might ask? Given that I started writing The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning in October, 2023, that’s a great question! Let’s talk about that, and a couple of other topics, after the infographic.

Last Week’s Progress By the Numbers

The good news is that I’ve incremented the book number from 10 (Dreams of Deucalion Book 1: Special Recon) to 11 (Dreams of Deucalion Book 2: Bait and Bleed).

As you can see, I’ve begun tracking progress for Dreams of Deucalion Book 2: Bait and Bleed. I’ve not started writing yet, but I’m working through two foundational elements. First, I have to develop the plan that Jadwiga Janczak refers to at the end of Special Recon. This will drive her action through the second and third books.

Second, I have to flesh out the mechanisms that the Investment Houses use to keep Earth and Earth’s Corporations under control. That control pervades all previous books. I have to make it very, very real. Real and defensible. I have to get this right, or a key element of my entire fictional universe falls apart. This, too, will drive the action for the next two books in Dreams of Deucalion.

But I don’t think I’ll be able to start writing this coming week. Reading aloud is why.

Throughput for Read-Alouds

I’ve read too many testimonials extolling the value of reading prose aloud. I’ve compared the results of editing my own chapters with two methods: silently reading or reading aloud. In every case, reading aloud gave me a better product. So, I’m reading all three manuscripts from The Sword of Sirius aloud.

All the while, I’m tempted to say, “Hey, while I’m reading, why not just record it for an audio book?” And all the while, I keep reminding myself of long it took me to record and edit a training video that ended up being just ten minutes long. If you’re interested, it was about three hours, including re-takes because I live in a house and not a recording studio. That video is about one quarter the length of a chapter. So, it would take me about a day of hard work to record and edit a chapter.

Anyway. I can read three chapters aloud an hour. If I really push hard, I could hit four. But if I do that, my concentration by the end of fourth chapter in the hour degrades too much. So, my goal is six chapters a day, and I write in two hour segments five days a week (sometimes six).

The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning weighed in at forty-five chapters, and I started its read-aloud on August 29th. I finished on September 4th. I had a Real Life Family Event (RLFE) involving my grandson and a zoo (it was priceless!), so that “cost” a day. On September 4th, I started reading The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone. As of today (September 8th), I’ve finished the first 22 chapters (I didn’t work on it on Friday). I should finish this week.

Since The Sword of Sirius Book 3: Firebreak is forty-two chapters, assuming six chapters per working day and five working days a week (thirty chapters a week), I should finish by the third week in September. So, it looks like I won’t be able to write anything new until then, unless I want to throttle back. And I don’t.

Challenges for Launch Scheduling

Different promo sites have different lead times. Since I’m not a hundred percent certain I can maintain this throughput (RLFEs happen with alarming regularity, and many aren’t as much fun as going to the zoo with my grandson, wife, daughter, and son in law), I don’t want to pay a ton of money only for it to misfire. So, I’ll probably wait until I have everything ready. Which means it’s likely I can’t launch into the first or second week of October. That’s later than I wanted.

That said, who’s hurt if I don’t launch until then? Or even in November? No one. People will remember a botched launch; no one will notice if I’m a few weeks later than I feared.

There is one bright spot. I purchased Vellum to format the ebook and paperback. Last week, I mentioned that I wanted to look at it. Turns out it might have two key features that could make a big difference:

1. Its formatter lets me be more creative and (hopefully!) effective with back matter.
2. It can output a version of the paperback in the same step as creating ebooks.

It can’t really be that easy — can it?

My current process, which involves using the Word template that Amazon provides for the paperback version, takes three or four hours to get right. If Vellum performs (and I won’t know until I get the proofs), it could save me nine hours of work on this trilogy alone. Plus, it could provide the kind of back matter I want to generate more sales.

Could I do that with Kindle Create and Word? Yes. I have done it. But it’s time-consuming and painful. I was amazed at how easy Vellum made it look. But I still don’t know if it actually works! So, more to come.

Progress against Last Week’s Goals

Here’s how I did against last week’s goals:

1. Complete the final draft of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning: Done!
2. Start the final draft of The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone: Done!
3. Prototype the ebook version of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning in Vellum: Done!
4. Establish the Scrivener project for Dreams of Deucalion Book 2: Bait and Bleed and begin sketching the character starting points: Done! This felt really, really satisfying!
5. Rebuild the Facebook ad for September and see if revitalized ad copy helps sales of Evolution’s Hand Book 1: Executive Action: Done! It’s too early to know if it’s working yet.

Goals for the Week in Progress Report 2024 Week 37

Here’s what I hope to accomplish this week:

1. Finish the final draft of The Sword of Sirius Book 2: Collapse Zone
2. Start the final draft of The Sword of Sirius Book 3: Firebreak
3. Produce the ebook and paperback versions of The Sword of Sirius Book 1: Red Flag Warning and upload to Amazon. Review the ebook format; order proof copies of the paperback.
4. Flesh out Jadwiga Janczak’s plan for her war against the Fourth Reich and the Investment Houses (stretch objectives)

What Do You Think?

How do you balance writing new content and editing? How long do you let a manuscript sit before beginning to edit it? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!