Out of Position 3: Update

Major revision pass finished. There will be a short smoothing pass early next week.

Some stats: The draft before the start of this revision was 129,464 words. The number of words in my “unused” file (removed from the draft) is 15,703 (for this revision; it’s 18,523 overall). And the total number of words in the story now stands at 141,182. So I have added (quick reference to calculator) 27,421 words to this draft.

I did this in about two and a half weeks of work, including parts of weekends. There are many new scenes and a couple old ones rewritten from scratch, but probably at least half of those words are plot-related, getting the through-lines right for Lee and Dev, and maybe a tenth by volume are stylistic changes. Often when I was just changing the words around, I wouldn’t bother dropping the cut words into the unused file, but sometimes I did.

I am not going to be talking about the plot, nor about which characters appear or don’t–at least, not very much(*). What I will say is that I think this is a strong story, and I think you will like the development of some existing characters as well as the introduction of a couple new ones. I also want to assure people that there IS going to be a book 4 and likely a book 5; the end of this book was originally the midpoint of the entire manuscript I wrote, and while the overall plot is resolved, there are certain threads that are intentionally left dangling.

* If I haven’t gone into my reasons for not giving spoilers before, it boils down to: the only thing it does is start you imagining the story in your head before you’ve had a chance to read it, and then the actual story will likely be a letdown compared to the story in your head because that’s the one YOU WROTE. So if I say something like, “there’s a scene where Dev and Lee go to an amusement park and WINK WINK(**),” you immediately start thinking, “Ooh, I bet I know what they do there!” and then when you read MY scene, it’s almost certainly NOT what you’re thinking, and so you’re a little disappointed. I don’t want you guys to be disappointed. So just hang on. I promise you it’s a good story.

** Dev and Lee do not go to an amusement park.

I’m excited about this revision. I got a lot of good work done on it, I think I got back into the feel of Dev and Lee in a way that makes me happy, and it’s only four months or so until you guys get to see it. Also I don’t have to be stressing about it when I go to RF, so yay. (I am going to RainFurrest and debuting another book there. Did I mention? You should check it out. I’m proud of that one too. I’ll post more about it this weekend.)