This morning I wrote the proverbial “The End” to a novel. The novel is provisionally titled, Not A Man to Back Down, and it is the second book in my Speaker for the Dead series.

My notes say I started it on March 19th, so this was a long slog. To be fair, I stopped work on it to tend to a few short pieces, and even a rewrite of the first chapter of Speaker for the Dead, which is the start of the series. I was sending out packages to agents on SFTD as I started book 2, so there was a lot of cross pollination. Plus I wrote a lot of supporting copy at that time that needed to be done to find an agent, like query letters, synopsis, etc. It’s all writing. Some of it is just not very sexy writing.

Not a Man, (or NAMTBD) is far from being finished. There is still much work to be done. What I did was finish the first pass. My alpha. Next will be a read of the alpha on my kindle, which will probably happen some time in December, so it’s a little less fresh. Already I forgot how much of the novel starts, which is good. The less I know in advance, the more I can find wrong with it. The alpha read will largely be for continuation and to get a feel for what I am missing. Right now I have a sense that there are parts in the front that will need to be rewritten to align better with the back side, but I don’t know for sure. Have to read the thing in one go, like I do every other book, to see how it’s working.

I do this with everything I write, it’s just with a novel it’s much harder. I can keep around 25k words in my head in terms of plotting and such, but even that is tricky. This is why I wrote notes and roughly outline the major plot points on large stories so I write to those points and not necessarily what I remember.

As I read through it, I’ll make edits on my phone, and based on those I will cut and paste the novel into something that is more cohesive. Sometimes this means moving chapters around or writing entirely new ones. Sometimes this means just rewriting a few key sentences to get everything aligned. This novel also has something new, a few very short stories told from the POV of someone who bumps into Lissa Carter Jones, the proverbial Speaker for the Dead. I thought it would be a fun way to show what she is up to, but not in her voice, or the voices of the main characters. They will be dropped in the middle of the novel as a way to break things up and give a better sense of how overwhelmed Lissa is in helping the dead.

Eventually all of this work this will result in a Beta version. It’s at that point, when I am happy the book stands well on its own, that I will send it out to my beta readers.

Drop a line if you want to be in on that hot Beta fun.

In other news, I signed my first professional literary contract this week. Super exciting. My little story C’mon Boys is all gown up and it about to move out to Issue 7 at Baubles From Bones. Snif, sniff. I’ll be posting as soon as I have a link. It should be out early December.