Draft 8 Done

Okay, time for an update. Two Fridays ago I finished re-writing draft 8 of my present manuscript. Draft 8 was a major, MAJOR re-write, where I:

• Deleted one major character
• Added four major characters
• Added a new main plotline
• Added a frame story
• Deleted about 2/5ths of my story and replaced it
• Added about 70,000 words
• Re-designed the magic system(s)

Overall, I’m surprised I managed to keep as much of my story as I actually wound up keeping. Draft 8 took me about 3 months to write. It is now 160,000 words long.

After finishing Draft 8, I took a week off, and now I’m beginning Draft 9. Draft 9 will be another content edit, but it won’t be as major an edit as Draft 8. In Draft 9, I will:

• Delete one major character
• Go back and work on Character Motivations/Character Backstories
• Delete and replace about 1/5th of the story

Draft 9 will be more of a refinement draft, as opposed to a whole-cloth re-write. I hope it will only take about a month. Once finished with Draft 9, I will do a Draft 10 prose edit, where I clean up the prose some plus delete around 40,000 words to make it a more saleable 120,000 words long. Once I finished Draft 10, I’ll

If you want to get daily updates of my progress, I post updates daily on my twitterfeed @scribblermendez.