BitBoR: Updates & Plans

With the release of the website this week, I’ve been a little distracted. I admit that it’s been nice to take a break from the endless stream of writing and editing, but I’m anxious to get back to it.

When this week started I was in a funk. Not a ‘I can’t think of what to write’ funk but a ‘why didn’t I edit more thoroughly as I was writing… please, make it stop’ funk. So, my wife made the brilliant suggestion of starting my website now… and here we are.

Creating the website prompted me to write a quick short story. Which I did. ‘Threads of Night’ it is publishing over several days, one scene per day.

But we know all that, Rick!

What you aren’t aware of is that I’ve also been working on a series of blog posts that describe Ayrelon’s magic system in grand detail. The series is long, and there’s a lot of information to take in. So, I’ve scheduled the posts to begin on Monday, Aug 24th, and continue every Monday, Wednesday & Friday until September 14th.

I have a few of those articles to button up, and then I’ll be back in the editing game as I try desperately to catch my editing up to where my writing is. For those interested in the details, I have edited up to page 199 out of 609 written pages using Pro Writing Aid.

Now… that doesn’t mean I wasn’t editing before. However, Scrivener for Windows doesn’t include Grammar or Readability checks. My editing prior to purchasing a license for Pro Writing Aid was reading over it myself, tweaking what I could find, loading it into Word, fixing whatever I could there, handing it off to the wife, editing whatever she found… and then repeating that process a few times. Exhausting, right?

I picked up Pro Writing Aid a few weeks ago, and I’ve ripped through my work as best as I could to catch up so that I can edit as I write. Basically, I piled up a huge backlog of work to do and I’m now paying that debt.

Interestingly enough, my writing improved quite a bit through those 609 pages. So, one of the things I’m also doing is updating the first half of the book to more closely match the last half of the book. So, maybe that will help you understand why this is taking so long.

Bear in mind, I didn’t start writing Bathed in the Blood of Ravens until mid June, so this is still fairly impressive, in my opinion. But… I can move faster. I’ve slowed down during August, and I need to pick that pace back up.

For what it’s worth, I see the entire A Destiny of Blood & Magic series as one long, continuous book. So… at the moment I have the first book ready for beta readers, I’ll already be knee deep into the second. The ending scene of book 1 literally flows right into the beginning scene of book 2.

All of that said, I apologize for the fluctuating state of the website these past two days. I literally launched the site, threw a temporary logo on top and tossed it into Facebook. After two days of toying with everything and crafting new logo images, thumbnails, etc… it’s finally in a state where I’m happy with it… for now.

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