Justicar Jhee and the Spectral Armada
A Justicar Jhee Mystery
A Justicar Jhee Mystery
I may have to switch over to work on the Urban Fantasy series. My target length for the individual books is in the 100K+ epic fantasy range. I have a good deal on multiple content edits up to 100K words, but only for a limited time. The first book’s current draft clocks in at 210K words. While I plan to cut it down or split it up into more manageable pieces, they’ll still be 80K to 100K, tens of thousands words longer than the mysteries. Because the content edits can’t be combined, it’s better to submit longer books.
I did another read through of Book 1 and it reads much better than I thought. However, sections are quite spotty in quality.
I’m allowing this one to cool, while I switch over to work on some of the others.
I started the read through and scene listing. I’d finalized the names of the main recurring characters after I wrote the first draft, so first up though is a find and replace. There are also a few more recurring side characters who received final(-ish) names too. As usual, I’m still working on names for the book specific characters.
I hope the feeling I wrote cleaner copy this time round was not an illusion. A quick glance at the project statistics shows almost no story notes, though I am skeptical. After how messy the other two book’s first drafts turned out, I strove to write out what I could. I suspect I wrote a good amount of story notes, but just didn’t mark them. For the other books, I don’t think I marked the non-story text until the read through anyway. Because I had not learned how to include annotations and comments in the compile yet, I avoided their use. And I wanted to make sure those words counted towards my NaNoWriMo goal.
During the read through, I’ll locate any summary text and story notes I find and convert them into inline annotations. Once the notes-to-self are properly marked, I’ll have a better idea of the story to notes ratio. From there, I’ll compile a master snippets file to have a better idea of story length.
Have a lovely day!