I am very pleased to say that From the Grave of the Gods has now reached the professional edit stage of the process. A week ago I completed my fifth editing pass on the novel, bringing the word count to just over 120,000 words. All major rewrites and scene additions are done; I’ve tidied up prose and policed for typos as much as I possibly can. So now it’s time to turn it over to the professionals.

The manuscript will be with my editor until sometime in May, at which point I fully expect to see a ton of notes and adjustments telling me how things can be improved. I’ve gone for a mixture of developmental and copy-edit, which will have a greater focus on the latter (looking at word and sentence usage, and flow) while still highlighting any really glaring structural issues.

As long as everything comes back all right, I’ll be looking at publication sometime in the second half of this year.

In the meantime…

While the main novel is away with the editor, I’m not taking a break by any stretch. I still have my “Meet the Characters” blog series to carry on with (check out the first post in that series here), and I can now also really focus in on self-editing The Re-Emergence novella. I am just waiting for one last feedback document from my beta readers on that, then I can get to work with the improvements.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Well, that’s all I have for you at the moment. Please do keep an eye out on my social media for further blog posts and updates - especially for the second post in the “Meet the Characters” series, which should be up at the start of February.