The process of writing and editing the Dream of Asarlai trilogy–part two, Power Unbound

So yesterday, I took you through the process that took Secret Ones from idea to published book. Today, I'll tell you about Power Unbound.

At the moment, I'm assuming that Power Unbound now exists as a physical book. I'm on tenterhooks, waiting for my copies to arrive – shouldn't be too much longer. Every car that drives past, I wait to see if they'll stop in the driveway and will there be a knock at the door? Yeah, there are times working from home ain't such a great idea [image error]

Again, two things to note – a) this was originally written in 2003 and went through a couple of drafts that year, ending as a 60,000 word novel and b) this is just my experience. Every publisher does things differently, every author has a different experience with a publisher cause, at the end of the day, we're all individuals (I'm not*)

Book two – Power Unbound

As stated in the post on Secret Ones, I chose not to work on this book until book one was sold. When in July 2009 it became clear that the series was going to be acquired by HarperVoyager, I pulled Freedom to Be (as it was then known) out of hibernation and started working on it.

I had a whole hell of a lot of work to do. Not only did it only have 60,000 of the needed 110,000, but a lot of that 60,000 would have to go because I either stole ideas from it for Secret Ones or things had changed so much that they weren't viable any more.

I worked out a timetable to have it ready for submission by the end of January 2010 and then ploughed ahead. A friend had bought me Valerie Parv's book on writing romance, and there was a terrific romance plotting diagram in there, so I used that for Ione and Stephen.

I was exceedingly dedicated – every day I wasn't working, I was writing. Days I had late shifts, I wrote in the morning. By the end of August, the new story existed.

I left it alone for a month and then in early September, started revisions. I found another document to use – Cat Sparks had shown me a great online diagram from a screenwriter about the structure of a movie. It works brilliantly in terms of checking the growth of plot in a novel. I filled that in, as well as re-doing the romance plot chart.

Then from Scott Westerfeld, I learnt about charting the plot in spreadsheets, using colours to clearly see what type of scene is happening where. It gives you a clear picture of where the story is lagging, where you're going too fast and not giving people breathing space and so on. Finally, I had all the tools in place to nail plotting.

Doing edits on book one interrupted work in October, but finally at the end of the month it was ready for the readers. At the end of November, I got the feedback but I didn't work on it straight away. I'd started working on book three and I decided that I wanted to get as much of it done as I could, so that I could make sure I had things right in the earlier books.

December 9, started thinking about and working on book two again. This lasted until December 22, when the copyedits of book one arrived. I wasn't able to return to book two until January 8 2010 – only three weeks before the book was due for submission.

I did the spreadsheet again, did the plot structure for book book two and the entire trilogy, made some changes and polished and it was sent to Stephanie two days before deadline.

Her feedback came via a phone call in early March 2010 and it was long. I had a HELL of a lot of work to do. She wanted to see more of Maggie and Lucas. She also felt that a character I'd put in to create tension needed to have more a place in the story than just to create tension.

I sent the new version to her April 5. Better, was the response, but still not working. In particular, there was a concern that the beginning wasn't working – there was a lack of emotional connection which was something that was coming through in feedback about Secret Ones (advanced reader copies were out). I adjusted Ione's opening scene and then tinkered with the very first scene, written from Asarlai's POV. It was a very harsh scene and I wondered if maybe it could be softened if told from another's POV. So hence the beginning of Power Unbound, which features the only scene in the entire series told from the POV of someone other than Asarlai or the romantic leads. That was delivered May 13, and was declared satisfactory to go into the editing cycle.

It was hard, having to edit twice at this point – I really was questioning whether I could write, whether this was some terrible joke at my expense. However, I'm really proud of the work that was done and hopefully everyone who loved Secret Ones will love Power Unbound just as much.

The copy-edits arrived June 21, once again with Kate 1 at the helm. Once again, Kate had some thoughts about things that weren't quite ringing true with her – there were some things she thought weren't necessary and after some thought, I agreed. There was also a problem with the motivation for two of the male characters.

I have to admit, I'm still delighted with myself at my solution to that – I came up with something that solved the problem for both characters with one thing. Love it!

I wrote 33 new documents for this copy edit, and it was returned to Kate July 2. This was just in time – Kate left just a few weeks later and the management of Power Unbound and Rogue Gadda was passed onto Kate 2.

Kate 2 does things a little differently to Kate 1 and the proofs for Power Unbound happened differently. The pages came to me August 6 without proofreaders queries – that hadn't happened yet. So I sat down and proofed the pages myself, then waited. The queries arrived August 25 and were needed back by September 8 (so I was working over Worldcon). There wasn't much in the way of queries, so it was relatively easy to do.

I sent the proofs back, expecting not to see the book again until the physical copies arrived but Kate 2 wanted us both to have one more go over it, to make sure all the corrections had been made before it was sent to the printer. I admit I was glad about that – there had been a couple of scenes missing in the proof copy that came to me and I was happy to have a chance to check that it had been fixed before the book went to print.

October 21 the final pages came to me, October 27 Kate came to me with some final questions (all of which I approved) and it was done.

Book two – Power Unbound

Resumed working on it July 2009. Wrote another five drafts before submission on February 1 2010 Pretty-much re-wrote the entire book – very little remains from where I started Developed my meta-documents to help with editing Required two editing passes over two months to get past publisher Wrote an extra 33 documents during copy-edit

As a reminder, this is how Secret Ones went

Resumed working on it late 2006. Wrote another seven drafts before ready for submission Added a further 50,000 words and Asarlai storyline Only required nine days and minimal re-writing in publisher's editing pass Total of 38 new documents required for copy-edit

* This week's Monty Python quote.