It’s awkward to have a post on an expired sale as the lead post on my blog, so I thought I’d write a brief update on where things stand with the ongoing project, just to have something fresh here.

Over the past months — and especially the last few weeks — I have been consumed with writing a first, very rough draft of the third book in The Red trilogy. I’d hoped to finish it last weekend, but alas, no. Then I was sure I would finish it by the end of the week. Nope!

I do have excuses, though. On Tuesday the copyedited manuscript for The Red: First Light arrived from Saga Press. (Read about what a copyeditor does here.) Yes, that book has been copyedited before, prior to its initial publication. So of course the copyeditor only found some stylistic elements to “fix,” right? For example, there was much debate about how to present the initials “L. T.” when soldiers are pronouncing them “ell-tee.” I settled on the solution in the previous sentence, following a reference in the Chicago Manual of Style. Others counseled me to just go with “LT” — and that’s what the copyeditor decided. I don’t have any huge objection to this. I just hope it gets pronounced the right way when people read it.

So, it was all just technical stuff like that, right? Uh, well, no. Let’s just say, “Mistakes were made.” Not many, not obvious, but given how many times the manuscript has already been looked at… ::sigh::

So I spent much of the week processing copyedits and entering the changes into a copy of the manuscript. I’m almost done, and plan to send the manuscript back to Saga Press on Monday, but the process has consumed a lot of time that would have normally gone to staring at a computer screen wondering how to end book three…

Which brings me to the next excuse for not having finished quite yet — a new idea introduced itself, a means to add another level of drama and tension to the last big scene… but I’m still working out the motivation behind one obscure character, and that’s holding everything up. It’s gotten frustrating. To say the least.

At this point, I think I need to write “an” ending and then get started on the revision so that I can ultimately write “the” ending because things do change between drafts. Wish me luck!

Posted on: Saturday, October 25th, 2014 at 9:39 am
Categories: Writing.
Tags: copyedit, Saga Press, The Red: First Light