I think I should explain exactly how my “schedule” works. Hopefully this will give some insight as to why it took so long for Spiritbinders to see the light of day, when I supposedly finished the final draft back in April.

The first step is writing the story. Unsurprisingly, this is the hardest part.

The thing to understand is that I don’t write as a full-time job. I’m a software developer. I spend roughly eight hours each day coding and testing, and I only write during my free time; free time that I also like to spend doing other things. So I have to dedicate parts of my free time to my professional writing (the better phrase would probably be “commercial” writing, actually), alongside a fanfiction project that I genuinely care about, and a Pathfinder campaign that I’m running alongside that, AND designing a tabletop RPG of my own. So the end result of that is that I can only add very incrementally to my stories, about 400-500 words on a good day. Sometimes the winds blow in my favour and I can get through 1000 or more words in a single writing session, but that’s typically only for scenes that I’ve been picturing in my head for a long time.

Then, once it’s written, it goes to the writing group.

I meet up with my writing group every Saturday, which consists of professionals and amateurs alike. These guys are more or less my beta readers. Generally, we take it turns reading and critiquing each other’s works, with about ten minutes dedicated to each work. Given that half of those ten minutes is me reading my work and the other half is listening to critiques, this means that getting feedback is slow. I do sometimes hang back later for a longer, more intensive feedback session, but not always.

That whole process was just the first draft. After passing it through the writing group comes the second, third, and eventually fourth drafts, each of which incrementally improve upon the draft before it until I’m satisfied. Generally, these drafts don’t take as long to write as the first one, just because I’m building on existing material, but sometimes I have to completely re-write the story’s structure into something passable, as I had to do with the first draft of Clanless.

Finally, once that’s all done, I send it off to be edited.

Now, I don’t have a singular editor at the moment. I’ve employed the services of a couple of different ones for each story. Claire Bradshaw edited my first story, A Soldier’s Lot, while Liam O.K. Selby edited Spiritbinders. I’m still “shopping around” for editors, since I’m still quite new to the industry, and the short story format means that I can get one editor to look through one story and another editor to look through another. Both Claire and Liam were a pleasure to work with, and I’d highly recommend them to anyone who’s looking for their own editor.

Once they’ve edited my story, it’s up to me to apply the edits, looking through each one and deciding which ones I’m going to apply and which ones I’m going to ignore. And only then, once I’ve consolidated it all into a final copy, do I post the story to the blog.

So, yeah, that’s my process. Dunno if it’s efficient, but eh. I’m learning.

In other news, I am currently writing the fourth draft of Clanless, so that story is much closer to the editing step than the others. The first draft of A Matter of Faith is somewhere between 30% to 40% finished, and I’ve written the first page of She-Devil. So, that’s where we’re currently at with that.

Next week, I’ll give you guys an excerpt of Clanless, to give you guys an idea of what’s coming up. I’ll see you all then!