This post is a good news / bad news sort of thing. The bad news is that my editing and rewriting process is painfully slow, so I’m slogging my way through 277 pages of manuscript and making very slow progress. The good news is that this process is making the book better and more consistent throughout, so it’s worthwhile.

Today I finished editing Chapter 24 out of 38. Every time I finish five chapters, I send the whole thing to my Trusted Beta Reader for review. Barring any major comments from the TBR (such as “this whole thing is crap”), the chapters I’ve finished are essentially done and ready for publication.

So hang in there, and thanks for your patience…

Thanks once again to my [very small but vibrant] fan community for being patient.

I am working on a daily basis to get the final round of editing finished, with a plan to get the sequel to Forest released this summer. The process is slow because I am being very picky about every word, but I am making good progress. I have completed the editing on 10 chapters, which puts me about 25% of the way through, and I’ve been getting through about one chapter every three days. I am submitting chunks of manuscript to my Trusted Beta Reader as soon as I get through it, so the review and editing processes are running in parallel.

No one wants to get this book finished more than I do, so I am wasting no time. Please bear with me just a couple more months — I promise it will be worth the wait.

In my last update, I mentioned that I was working on the final chapter of Book 2 in the Terwilliger trilogy. After months of pushing through it, that monster of a last chapter is finished. That one chapter turned out to be 20% of the total book, almost exactly 40,000 words. I’ll be splitting it up into at least 4 smaller chapters to make it more readable… but hopefully that explains why that one insanely complicated chapter took me so many months to get through.

With that, the first draft of the novel is complete. The next step is rewriting and editing, which (unfortunately) takes a long time. The good news is that this draft is relatively close to what I would consider presentable — as compared to the initial draft of FOREST, which I basically wrote a second time from the ground up because I was not satisfied with the original. Even so, it will probably take several months to get through the rewrite phase.

Thanks, as always, for being patient.

A very kind reader reminded me recently that it’s been well over a year since I posted an update on the sequel to Forest. The writing has taken me much longer than I had anticipated, partly because the story has turned in directions that I did not expect. This has required me to retrace my steps a bit.

The good news is that I am currently writing the final chapter… but that chapter has proven to be a monster to write. There are 6 different character POVs that come together at the end of the novel, each one interconnected with the others in a way that makes the whole thing very tricky (and time-consuming) to keep track of.

I continue to make daily progress and estimate that I’m within about two weeks of being done with the first draft of the full manuscript. After that, there will be revision and edits — I have several hundred little notes to myself (continuity issues and minor fixes) that I need to go back and address. It will be a while before that’s done, and I appreciate your patience. Considering that the first book took me a full 8 years from concept to production, and the second one has only been in progress for about 19 months, this one is going much faster.

Thanks for your patience.

Since I haven’t posted in such a long time, I thought I’d provide an update on my progress on the sequel to Forest of the Mind.

As of today, I have just crossed the 30,000 word mark on Book 2. For comparison, Forest was a total of 157,000 words. Assuming a similar length, that puts me just under 20% of the way through. I am currently holding myself to a target of one new page (about 700 words) per day, hopefully most of them non-crappy words that I don’t have to re-do later. We’ll see how long that target stands up against the realities of life, but so far it’s been working out.