Wilders Complete

Haven't made an update to my progress on The Hope of Memory trilogy in a while... because I was waiting to finish the first draft of Wilders before doing so. Well, it's done.

6/6/12 - 2/6/13, 11 notepads, at least 5 or 6 pens and an estimated 189K words, only a little over my target of 180K. It took a little longer than I planned, since I'm also working on an iPad app in my spare time, and that takes up many hours as well. Now I must type it all up, revising as I go.

11 notepads on which Wilders was written, spread out

11 notepads on which Wilders was written, in a stack

But at least I can finish the fourth draft of The Distant and get that novel finalized. As I said in previous updates, I wasn't comfortable finalizing that one until I was finished with Wilders. There are a lot of details in the second book that apply to the first, and now that I have that fleshed out, The Distant can be fixed to account for them. That's what you get when you don't plan all the details out ahead of time. I always come up with better ideas as I'm writing, and would rather spend extra time writing them in now and revising old material rather than sticking to a rigid outline and let the story suffer.

Now... I'm anxious to start on the third and final book, Rom Tar, but I'll hold off on that for a little while. I'm still debating whether to do the first draft by longhand again. I've done that for most of my books and stories, as it always gives me a cheap hard copy to fall back on (notepads and pens are much cheaper than printer cartridges and paper), but it does add a lot of extra work and it's harder to refer back to previous parts (as evidenced by the sticky notes for each chapter in the picture above).

Anyway, hopefully I can release The Distant by summer.