Starforgers Update

The first novel in the Star Trilogy – Starforgers is still out to my Beta Readers. Next week I will be compiling their comments into a hit-list and setting out to edit the second draft of the novel. What I wind up with is usually a bullet list of things that need changing. Those things can be as easy as word choice or as complicated as character arcs. But all are things that I deem important enough to fix before the manuscript goes to my editor.

The second draft is usually where my novels start to become polished. All the plot holes are plugged and the readability improves dramatically. I focus on all those things that writers are supposed to do to make their writing more interesting and more believable. Sometimes connections are made that I can make smoother and sometimes I drop things that did not work with the Beta Readers or add things to make it more comprehensible to the reader.

One of the problems I’ve had with this particular novel is that I have written a dozen short stories (Tales From Ocherva) about most of the primary characters and so I have a familiarity with them that the reader of this novel does not. I have to remember to mention things that happened in the shorts where applicable and explain why a character might behave the way he or she does in this novel. That over familiarity made the novel easy to write, but it also leads to assumptions on my part that the reader knows what I know and the fact is, he does not.

So August will be a busy month for me, editing the second draft of Starforgers. As soon as I finish that draft, I will be sending it off to my editor. I usually give her a month to work her magic and then I give myself a few weeks to make her corrections. The final edited manuscript then goes to a copy editor to make sure there are no typos before going to the presses.

What does all of that mean for you, the reader? It means you can look for the ebook version of Starforgers to be released in late September or early October. That’s my release goal. In that time I also have to clean up the cover of Starstrikers, adding that it is book 2 in the Star Trilogy. So you will see cover updates on Starstrikers and Tyrmia this fall in addition to a new novel.

Later this fall, I will begin to write Starveyers, the final book in the Star Trilogy. The goal is to release that next October.