Merritt's Story - Process/Progress (Patreon)

I'm still aiming to release the first chapter of Merritt's story this month, but I'm also taking some extra time to get things as polished as possible.  I'm sharing a little bit of process work so you all can see what's involved.

Over the past three years, I've been working on the first draft of the story in my spare time.  The draft is nearly finished, but it still needs the final chunk written.

Basically, no one in the world except me can ever see my first drafts because they're horrid.  I usually don't have much of an issue with grammar or spelling, but the actual *story* needs a lot of work at this point.  The difference between a first draft and a second draft is big enough that I don't even bother tracking changes on them because sometimes it amounts to a full rewrite.

After hacking and slashing the first draft, I send my cleaned up second draft to my four (super awesome wonderful amazing) beta readers!  When I send them a scene, I've resolved all the issues I can clearly see from my vantage point as the author.  But an author's view of their own work is always limited, especially with stories this big and this familiar.  It's easy for me to forget that a new reader doesn't know my world and my characters, and I have to really work hard at showing readers who/what they are.

So then the beta readers send me back their comments, and I read over them and stew on them and try to figure out how to solve the problems they pointed out to me, and I get back to work.  And THAT's what you see here.  Up above is a sampling of my edits after the second draft, after I'd supposedly fixed everything that I thought needed fixing.  Granted, these are heavier changes than average, and some pages end up not needing any changes.  But the point is there's definitely a lot of editing going on. ^_^  The impact my beta readers have made on this story is HUGE, and I owe them many many many thanks.

The columns on the side mostly show deletions, while the red underlined stuff is additions.  My first and second drafts tend to be sparse, so I usually end up adding more than I take out.

So basically, all those times during my hiatus where it looked like I wasn't doing much besides posting ferret pictures on tumblr, this is what I was up to. ^_^  Showing progress on a prose story is a little trickier than showing art WIPs.   But man, I'm REALLY looking forward to launching this story!  So far, I've gotten comments back up through chapter 8, and I've done third drafts through chapter 6.  Once I'm done with third/fourth drafts through chapter 8 and the cover art, I'll be ready to launch.