Early for once...
I released a new bonus short story for my newsletter subscribers, called Theory and Practice. See the previous blog post for more details of that.
I started the second draft of The Dragons of Asdanund. Officially, this is the structural edit - big picture, or as I sometimes call it, the right scenes in the right order. This book seems fairly solid on that front. I deleted a couple of scenes that didn't move the story forward, trimmed a few more that were too long, and fixed a few plot holes and continuity errors. As I might have mentioned with previous books, I track editing progress by keeping count of the number of comments that my critique group and I made on the first draft. When I implement the change that a comment asks for, or decide to ignore it, I delete it, so when I get to zero, the second draft will be done. When I started the second draft, I had 603 comments, and I now have 60.
All being well, I'll soon be ready to start the line edit, which is the right words in the right order. This is where I switch to the highlighting mode in my editing program that flags all the words my critique group tell me I use too much, by printing them in red, and gently weep over how the screen now resembles a crime scene ;-)