Pro Edit Stage Reached… Again!
The Shadow of Arcadia has now reached the stage of being sent off for a professional edit.
I am excited to say that I have now completed all the beta reader edits for The Shadow of Arcadia and it is now at the point in the book creation process where it needs to be sent off for a professional edit.
The word count currently sits at around 126,400 words, which is a little bit longer than From the Grave of the Gods was. All major rewrite and scene additions are done; I’ve tidied up the prose and typos as much as I possibly can. So now it’s time to turn it over to the professionals.
The manuscript will be with the editor until possibly April/May time. After I get it back, I’ll be full steam ahead on applying the edits, formatting, and then targeting publication hopefully sometime in June or July—watch this space for a release date reveal and the start of pre-orders.
Let me tell you, I am absolutely itching to get this book in my hands already, so I’m not dragging my feet on it by any means. It’s just that some parts of the process simply take as long as they take.
What’s happening in the meantime?
While the book is out with the editor, you can certainly look forward to more book reviews here on the blog, plus I'll be getting back to work on Legacy of the Gods. After NaNoWriMo, I realised I hadn’t thought through my outline enough and several aspects just weren’t working. Certain characters didn’t have full arcs at all, and parts of the worldbuilding were a bit rubbish. So I spent a lot of time replotting it all, focusing on each character’s arc, fleshing them out, and then applying them to a timeline so that everything flowed better (and believe me, the timeline is very important for this book because I’m juggling more than in previous books). Legacy of the Gods is the end of an era within the Augment Saga, so I am paranoid about doing it justice. It’s also likely to be quite a bit longer than the previous books.
The end of March will see the conclusion to the first ever Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship, of which The Re-Emergence is a finalist. It’s been getting some incredible reviews from all the judges, and I’m so happy to see my little space bird book getting so much love. I can’t wait to see where it ends up in the contest.
There’s also something else really cool coming soon on the horizon that I am yet to announce, and in April I’m looking forward to doing another craft fayre at Rainham Hall. I’d like to do more of these, but I have to be discerning as to the cost of the table. There’s one at Fairkytes again coming up soon, and one that my father-in-law is going to at the Royals Youth Centre in Rainham, but the table cost was too expensive for me. April will also see the return of the annual Narratess #IndieApril mega sale—so keep your eyes peeled for that!
