This post is for all my non-Facebook dwelling readers; those who haven’t been hanging out in my group and have therefore missed my weird ramblings and very-random word-count updates…

I’m still alive!

And, more importantly, I’m still writing!

(yes, I said more importantly. Don’t pretend you disagree😆)

Book 3 is shaping up to become quite the tome. Even after my editor gets through slashing it down to its bones, it’ll no doubt be longer than book 2 (which, let’s face it, was already pretty damned massive).

Anyways…

It’s a pretty big job. And I’ve learned a HUGE lesson. Never again will I write the first draft of a trilogy and then move on to revision. It doesn’t work. Each book gets progressively more difficult and requires more extensive re-writes, additions, and deep edits.

It’s crazy.

Look, book 1 started off around 550 or so pages. During editing/revision, it grew all the way to 670 pages. Not too bad, but that means over 100 pages of new content was added! (I blame my characters, just FYI. They don’t know when to stop talking!)

So when I went into editing for book 2, I had to adjust to the additions in book 1. Which wasn’t too hard, but these characters are so stubborn, and hard-headed, and so very alive that book 2 grew from a little under 500 pages to 740 pages! That’s over 250 pages of new stuff (basically an entire book!) which meant that when I opened the first draft of book 3…

To say it was lacking is an understatement.

To put it in perspective, what USED to be scene 1 of book 3 is now scene… I DON’T WANT TO SAY😳

AAAAH!

So yeah… definitely never doing that whole first-draft-the-entire-trilogy-before-edits thing again😆

I mean, I knew there would be a lot more words added to book 3 (I have so many notes that it took me a week just to organize them), but I didn’t think it would be quite this much. I’d also hoped to be done by now, but seeing as I got practically nothing done last year due to being sick, I’m over a year behind schedule (😭😭😭), though the last two months have gone pretty smoothly and I’ve only had a couple floor-dwelling episodes so things are definitely looking up!

To sum it up… Editing is a birch😆
(and so is Past Erica!!!)

Anyways… I’ll stop it here (didn’t quite live up to the “Short and Sweet” heading…), but I hope you’ll all bear with me while I cry over the keyboard and curse everything under the sun while my characters just do whatever the hell they want, leaving me to clean up the mess…😅

I’ll do another update soon(ish)

So I guess…

Bye?

❤️

(ending posts is hard)

(editing is harder)

( old scene 1 is now scene 10 – AAAH)

(words added: ~50 000. Scenes added: too many. Tears shed: 14 bucket’s worth and counting)