The last month has been a busy one in matters unrelated to my fiction writing, so there’s been a break from making solid progress.

In completing the latest Non-fiction draft, i set myself a reward for a trip away to reconnect with my novel and get new energy into the editing process.

I never had too much trouble sitting down to write, but the discipline of editing every day hasn’t stuck fully with me yet.

The reward week away on my own to rebuild momentum has been a big success, with my latest editing of A Fool’s Errand at over half the book.

It has been super helpful to get up every day and block out half the day with no other task but editing. That of course included new writing as well.

Key Work of Late:

• Editing more than 50% of the book
• Writing new chapters
• Checking in on key elements of my storyworld
• Finding some inconsistencies and correcting them
• Adding more into the world wiki I am using to manage all the elements

At times it feels like I am back at the very beginning writing the first few scenes, and the end of the tunnel is not even imaginable let alone finding any light there.

The editing and structural fixes, require lots of time resolving world building elements, and components needed in the later books, that I find myself seemingly editing two paragraphs of real words and the rest all background work or research.

After such a lengthy process there are moments where the temptation would be to either just stop all together, although that’s not really my nature, or to rush it out.

The goal with this work is to make it as solid a story as I am capable of at this stage in my writing. That doesn’t mean never bringing it to conclusion by always editing and re-editing, but it does mean working through the story structure and making it as coherent and enjoyable as I can.

Key Work of late:

• Editing scenes
• Finalising key parts of the critical elements in my story, such as the key groups in my world, what they are all pushing for, where they come from etc. While each had a skeleton that helped draft the story, the polish is coming from refining those items and my key characters.
• Adding more world building content to my encyclopedia of my world

Back in the words, and loving it. Currently working through scenes I identified in my structural audit that needed adjustment.
What does that mean?

Well in some cases when reviewing the structure of the story I could see that a key scene’s intensity needed to be raised. Think of a scale, if it was only a 3 it might need to be a 5 or a 6 in the context of where the story was.

Other scenes that just aren’t needed or are wrong for the story need to be re-written or removed.

While it took me longer than I wanted (or expected) to go through the structural editing the value now is very clear. Each day I pick off a scene and rewrite it to make the changes.

It’s so tempting to adjust other parts of the scenes as I read through, such as sentence structure or grammar, but I know at this point that getting the storyline to be complete is the key to getting this book published.

Key Work of late:

• Editing scenes
• Researching dyes, chalk, home cloth making in times gone by
• Adding more world building content to my encyclopedia of my world