Dream 3 enters first edit

eeded So I finished the review of the rough draft, which was a combination of editing, adjustment of plot holes, and a general check of the ‘flow’ of the story.

The latter is always in stories that took as much work as D3 did, because lead-in information on plot arcs and twists that did not made the grade have to be edited back to fit the main story.

I also use this time to throw in a few extra adjectives (at no extra charge) to add color and clarify descriptions.

The end result was that a rough draft of 99,207 words became a more polished product of 101,771. I don’t get too obsessive about word count, but you really need at least 75-80k words to qualify as a novel.

So now a hard copy will receive my wife’s editorial review, following which I will review the work and her notes, and make the needed adjustments.

I will have to take the cover photo and use GIMP to make it into a cover. Despite the simplicity of the covers I struggle mightily with cover design, as I am very poor at visual art. While I have hired artists for three books (The Zone, Chains of Honor, and the Phantom Badgers) it was a long drawn-out process, and they have since priced themselves out of my range. Other than finding artists who will donate existing work (Dark Path, Dark Practices, and Dark Tide), I am forced to make my own.

Luckily the Dream series runs to a type, and  I have already purchased a few small props for this book, so I will get this done while my wife edits.

I will not set a concrete date for when Dream 3 will be available for sale, but I hope to put it up for Kindle by the first week of July (Createspace tends to have a longer lag time).

I will continue to post developments.