The process of writing and editing the Dream of Asarlai trilogy-part three, Rogue Gadda.

If you've only just come back, you can read the first two parts here: Secret Ones and Power Unbound.

Technically, Rogue Gadda hasn't finished the publication process. There's still the proofs to be done. There could also be a cover change – I guess it depends how people react to the cover of Power Unbound (if you've got Secret Ones, you've got the original cover of Power Unbound at the back of the book).

However, you can't make massive changes at the proofing stage. The book has been typeset, and anything that upsets the page set-up will mean having the book re-typeset, something that the author has to pay for. Fair enough, I think – I've heard stories of authors wanting to re-write entire sections at this point and pushing publication back and causing all sorts of issues. So realistically, there might be changes to words and sentence structure, but Rogue Gadda now exists as it will appear in published form. So, onto how that all came to be.

Book three – Rogue Gadda.

This book (originally titled Chance and Reward) had a whole new set of challenges – for the first time in my life, I had to satisfactorily wind up a trilogy.

I started work on it in November 2009, while my beta readers had Power Unbound. It was the longest at this point – 70,000 words – and I figured I'd be able to keep most of those. That ended up not being true, but there's more of the original in this book than in Power Unbound (Secret Ones contains most of the original book).

I plotted it out on the spreadsheet and then began revising. I wrote like a mad woman until early December, when I'd gotten to a point where I felt I knew how it would end well enough to go back and work on book two. At this point, it was around 85,000 words.

I picked it up again on February 15 2010. I read it and decided I needed to do some planning on the overall trilogy plot (particularly what Asarlai was doing) before I continued.

At the beginning of March, I'd finished the draft of the new Rogue Gadda. I did the screen structure outline and the spreadsheet and then started to consider the weaknesses these showed.

Work then had to stop on Rogue Gadda, while I did the new editorial changes for Power Unbound and the proofs of Secret Ones. It was early April before I could pick the book up again.

By now I was getting worried – the deadline for this was July 1 and it wasn't anywhere near being ready. I let Stephanie know that I was concerned about making deadline, then put my head down ploughed ahead.

I had the revisions done by the beginning of May, worked over them and sent the book to the beta readers. I had it all planned out – how I could get it done within two months (while planning for the copyedits of Power Unbound, due in June). Even with time to give it to readers for their feedback.

Then, in late June, while at a writer's conference here in Canberra, I had a blinding flash of horror – in my panic to be done, I hadn't realised that there was a major plot point in Rogue Gadda that I couldn't use cause I'd done the same thing in Secret Ones!

Cap in hand, back to Stephanie, I asked for an extension. Luckily, Rogue Gadda had the longest-lead in to publication of all the books, so it was doable. New deadline – August 9.

Once copyedits of Power Unbound were done, my attention was then taken with the launch of Secret Ones, so it was the second week of July before I went back to Rogue Gadda to cut the offending scenes and work my way around this new plot-point.

I delivered Rogue Gadda on August 2 – a week ahead of deadline. I met with Stephanie at Worldcon in early September and thankfully, there wasn't much I needed to do. Make a character's motivation clearer, and I came up with a new ending for the heroine so she got to have her heroic moment, and it was done. Overall, she was really happy with it and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

It was sent to her September 16 and accepted, going into the editing pool.

Kate 2 had a freelance editor do the copy-edits of Rogue Gadda, and it was the cleanest of them all. It seemed the extra time on the deadline was well worth it. I've only written 16 extra documents and of those, most are just a couple of paragraphs. Barely a thousand extra words, I think.

So, things will be pretty quiet for a while now. I don't expect to see the proofs of Rogue Gadda until February/March next year. In the meantime, it's just a few weeks before Power Unbound hits the shelves. And I've got new novels to write [image error]

Book three – Rogue Gadda

Resumed working on it November 2009. Wrote another four drafts before submission August 2010 Had to get deadline extension in order to complete satisfactorily Only required small amount of editing, done in just over a week. Wrote 16 extra documents in copy-edit

Book One – Secret Ones

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

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

So, what are my overall thoughts? Well, I spent the most time on Secret Ones and it required the most work at the copy-editing stage but it was also the first novel and while I've written quite a few novels, I was still learning (particularly about plotting).

Power Unbound had the least amount of writing time, was actually the easiest of the books to write, and ended up requiring the most editing work because while I was getting better at writing novels, it was the first time I'd written a second novel in a trilogy and there were aspects of that I hadn't considered.

Rogue Gadda, thanks to the deadline extension, had a good amount of work done on it prior. I'd also learnt a lot from the editing process with the first two books, and was able to put that knowledge into this book. Hence the fact it required the least amount of work out of all of them.

So, what does this tell me? It would seem that six months is a bit too tight a turn around, but then I was working two jobs as well. Now that I'm just writing full time – maybe not so bad. I will try for a bit longer – eight months, if possible – to give myself that extra polish time.

Thanks to the massive workload involved here, I am a much better writer and novelist than I was in July last year. Nothing like a bit of pressure to forge a person. I look forward to putting my new knowledge and skills to work in future projects, and challenging myself to improve still further.