Happy New Draft

/ Stephen A. Watkins / Leave a comment

This is just a short post to say: I’ve officially completed the third draft of “The Book of M”. In the past few months I’ve gotten a couple beta-critiques, mostly focused on the early chapters. I also joined a Discord-based Writer’s Group, where I’ve shared some early chapters. The feedback there precipitated some fairly useful changes to the story. So far this has mostly led to adding word count to a book that’s already pushing the limits.

I’ve got a few notes for my next pass through, which will focus primarily on trimming word count and tightening the language as much as possible. After that… who knows? I still don’t let myself think too much about next steps. Probably because I’m at least a little afraid to contemplate the likely rejections that will ensue. But if I’m going to pursue this dream of mine to become a published author, eventually I’m going to have to buckle down and start submitting this book. And to do that, I’ll need to research likely markets and agents that might be interested in representing a work like mine.

I hope you and yours had a wonderful holiday season, and wish you the best in the New Year.

Second Draft Complete

/ Stephen A. Watkins / 2 Comments

You might perhaps suppose that it’s easier to edit a novel – putting together the second draft, and beyond – than it is to write that very first draft. Considering that it took me over ten years to write the first draft of “The Book of M”, and that I’ve been working on the second draft for only a little over one year, I must admit there’s evidence to support this thesis. That being said, having finally finished the second draft of “The Book of M” only yesterday, I’m not sure yet what I think. Did it go faster? Without question. Was it easier? That’s hard to say.

That’s the big news for today, of course. My second draft is complete. “The Book of M” is one step closer to… well, to what I don’t yet know. But it’s closer.

How many drafts does it take to properly polish a novel and get it in the best shape it can possibly be in? I don’t rightly know yet. Certainly, if you ask me, I’d say “The Book of M” – in its second draft form – is a pretty amazing book. I didn’t quite feel that way about the first draft: there were numerous inconsistencies that I had to iron out, changes that I wanted to make, etc. I’ve now achieved basically everything I wanted to achieve in this draft that is feasible to include.

And it’s still clocking in at over 135,000 words! Well over my target word count of 115,000.

Here’s the rub, though: I realize I’m much too close to it, now, to effectively cut anything. It all feels… well… indispensable. Like a critical part of the story as a whole. It’s difficult to imagine cutting anything.

And, I mean, I started this draft with over 297,000 words. So at first blush it seems like I did a lot of cutting. And, in essence, I did. But 90% of what I cut – or more likely more – is in the latter two-thirds of the book. There’s a whole storyline there that I envision could, with any luck, form the basis of a sequel. Even though, I know, it’s much too early to be thinking about writing the sequel. But still: the majority of the original storyline I set out to write with “The Book of M” has been removed from this draft, and is out there waiting for its chance to rise.

And, in fact, cutting out the full storyline that I’d envisioned, and zeroing in on the first third of the book, meant that I needed to manufacture a new story arc, with a new climax, and everything. And that meant adding new scenes that would support this new story arc and climax. The original draft of “The Book of M” didn’t contemplate a dividing point at the one-third mark, and I had to make it work. And I did.

But that necessitated a lot of new material. So where I started with something like 90,000 words of first draft material that would form the core of the new draft… well, now it’s at 136,000, isn’t it? And maybe 115,000 is too ambitious to cut down further. But could I cut it to 125,000? Possibly… but not without help.

And so, with the second draft done and in what I feel like is a good state… my next goal is to find that help: I need beta-readers. Frankly, I don’t even know how to go about finding beta-readers. So that’s going to be a lot of work, I imagine. I expect, in all likelihood, I’ll need to pay-it-forward if I’m going to get any beta reader attention on my book… by beta-reading some other folks’ books first. I’m vaguely aware of websites out there that do critique exchanges, and such. But I don’t intend to just jump into the first one I find… I’ll probably want to research these sites, if I actually find any, and make sure that my genre is welcome there (post-apocalyptic, steampunk-flavored epic fantasy to be precise… but just epic fantasy generally), and that there’s actually a viable community offering feedback, and so on.

I’ve avoided delving into these places until now… I wanted to make sure I had a finished draft to showcase before I spent any effort looking into them. Because, with the limited free time I have, I know there’s little chance I’ll get any writing done in a good while once I start reading other writers’ works.

As I work on this, I do have another project I’m also slotting into my free time. More on that later. It’s a writing-related tool of sorts, and I hope it will prove useful – to myself if to no one else. But my top mission at this point: identify the best places to start getting feedback on my finished second draft.

Approaching The End (Again)

/ Stephen A. Watkins / Leave a comment

I realized recently that it’s been quite a while since I posted here, and a proper update is overdue. Of course if you’re reading this, you already know I decided to rectify that. And what’s the latest and greatest with respect to “The Book of M”? Well take a look at that progress bar! As of today, the second draft of the book currently stands at over 114,000 words out of an planned 115,000. That’s pretty damn close to “The End”! Again! But of course you knew there was a catch.

This is a habit I’m going to have to resolve eventually, but I’m here to say: “The Book of M” is running long. Again.

Where I had planned to (hopefully) wrap things up in a neat package at 115,000 words, the reality looks like I’ll be closer to 130,000 words by the time I’m done with the second draft. And that’s not counting a possible narrative slip-up that may see me still have to go back retroactively to add in another 2,000 – 3,000 words. (More on that later.)

Now it’s not the end of the world for “The Book of M”. I did want to get it comfortably under the 120,000-word mark as an absolute maximum, and that’s not going to happen. Everything I’ve read recently says that even in the Epic Fantasy genre, where things run a bit longer than most other genres, a new author’s word allotment, so-to-speak, caps out at about 120,000 words. And if I’m over that limit, even by a little, then that unnecessarily limits my target audience – i.e. agents and editors who I’d otherwise hope would show an interest in “The Book of M” and consider picking it up for traditional publication.

But this is only the second draft. For me, things always grow in the second draft. But undoubtedly there will be slow parts that I will still need to trim and tighten up, and possibly some scenes that don’t fill enough of a role in the narrative that will need to be rolled into other scenes. In short, there’s work still to do. Will I be able to cut the next iteration down by over 10,000 words? Honestly, I don’t know. But I’ll keep polishing this book in whatever way I can until it shines as bright as the noonday sun.

The problem I alluded to above, however, is that I’m beginning to realize that the “final boss” – the villain who stands in the way of the MC’s final progression to “Hero” status – almost certainly needs more of an introduction than what I’ve given him. The book is roughly divided into five more-or-less equal(ish)-length “Acts” or “Parts”… and I don’t even introduce this “final boss” as a force to be reckoned with until the fifth and final act! The trouble is… from the MC’s point-of-view, at least in the current state of the Second Draft, that’s the first time she’s ever actually encountered this particular antagonist.

Which means I need to restructure things. Again. Somehow or another, I need to introduce the antagonist at a much earlier point in the narrative, and present him as a meaningful threat who opposes the MC’s ideals – whether that’s by having the two encounter each other at an earlier point in the story, or else by having another, secondary character interact with him earlier in the story.

The problem arises from the fact that this antagonist is, in fact, a new character in this iteration of the book. He’s simply never mentioned or seen in the original, 297,000-word first draft of the book. I created him in part because the MC won’t be in a position to defeat the primary antagonist of the first draft of the book until the end of that narrative arc… which, in breaking the book into three segments, likely won’t occur until the third book (if indeed I ever get a chance to write all three books in this narrative arc). So that character – the true capital-A Antagonist – is introduced at an early, appropriate place in the story. But because I hadn’t previously conceived of this new, minor antagonist who serves as a focal point of Book One, I have neither a proper introduction for him, nor any build-up of his character in the original material from the first draft.

All of which to say: I’m going to need to write that proper introduction and build-up, still. Which, on top of the expected 130,000 words I’m anticipating the second draft coming to, I’ll need to write new scenes worth an additional 2,000 – 3,000 words, as a baseline. Call it, altogether, at the end of the day, 135,000 words.

The added trouble is… I haven’t yet figured out how to introduce my Book One Antagonist at an earlier point in the story, nor either how to build him up. Do I make him a new view-point character? Or only show him from the POV of other characters (including the MC but, potentially, also including other side characters)?

Where I am now, I intend to go full steam ahead on the current version of the second draft outline, and reach “The End”. But in the back of my mind, I’m still mulling over the added challenge of introducing this character. Still, I may save that extra work for the third draft.

So what happens to “The Book of M” second draft? I’m still debating. If I’m honest, I’m beginning to really crave some productive feedback. Not a living soul besides myself has read any meaningful amount from the first draft of “The Book of M”. The second draft makes some substantial improvements and changes to the overall structure of the story. At this point, even with its known flaws (still too long by as much as 15% or more, the villain isn’t properly introduced at the right point in the story, etc.), I feel like I need to know whether I’m putting effort into something that is still worthwhile – not to mention, the chance for invaluable feedback that helps me diagnose where other problems may still lie. Call them alpha-readers or beta-readers… I don’t know, but I would dearly like to see what they have to say… if only I can find those readers.

It’s been somewhere well north of ten years since I began the journey to write “The Book of M”. I never imagined it taking that long… but life is unpredictable and often challenging. There were times when making progress on the story was next to impossible due to the exigencies of other life events. I had two, wonderful kids (who are both better than halfway grown now). I faced and (mostly) overcame health challenges and crises. Heck, I’m living through geopolitical crises today that scare the ever-living-hell out of me, and those things make it difficult to focus on my work as an author. I, my family, and the world around us have changed in ways often unforeseen, and I can’t deny that has affected my output. But today, I’m once again coming close to realizing the end of a part of this journey: the second draft is coming up on the finish line. And as I look both inwardly and outwardly, I need to know: is this journey I’m on actually going somewhere?

Time, and (hopefully) readers will tell.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

/ Stephen A. Watkins / 1 Comment

Writing work continues in fits and starts. In my last post, I mentioned that I was re-outlining my 297,000-word rough draft of “The Book of M”, an effort that in itself had ballooned into a twenty-plus page document (at the time). Well, I’m here to report that I’ve since finished that re-outlining process, which I immediately followed up by re-re-outlining in a much more abbreviated fashion, boiling all 297,000 words down to a comparatively brief seven-page outline document. All told, the full “beat” outline and the “brief” outline now comprise a 39-page document – altogether a 20,700-word document.

Why-oh-why can’t I do anything short?

I do sometimes feel like this revision process is going painfully slow. But when you consider that, technically speaking, I’ve written over 20,000 words in the past few months, it puts things in greater perspective. Yes, I know, a real novelist would easily outstrip that productivity pace. Heck, I’ve heard of some who put down, 5,000, even 10,000 words per day, and here it’s taken me two-and-a-half months to generate a 20,000-word outline. But for me, that’s a healthy clip. So I actually feel really good about that.

And why did I do this work, in the first place? It’s all in the title of this post (and I laid it out as one of my writing goals in my prior post). The entire point of all of this work has been to find a way to extract a 100,000-to-115,000-ish word novel from the pieces I’ve put in play in the whole 297,000-word manuscript. That’s a fairly draconian 61% cut in total length, best-case scenario.

The thing is, I’d decided, there’s no point in revising and cleaning up the whole 297,000-word draft into a second draft unless I could find a way to tell a complete story in 115,000-words or less. Realistically, I probably need to err more on the less side of that equation in the current traditional publishing market, even for an Epic Fantasy. (Which I’d always thought runs longer than other genres… but even so, apparently the tolerance for long works has declined significantly in recent years. Or so I’ve been told.)

Be that as it may, there was no way I would be able to reduce the sum total of “The Book of M” into a second draft that short. Instead, I’ve opted for a more creative (and less destructive) approach: splitting “The Book of M” into three parts.

Yet this decision brought with it a fresh set of challenges that, since completing my re-outline, I’ve been attempting to tackle. Because maybe in total length “The Book of M” kinda-sorta looks like a trilogy, the fact remains that a first novel – both a debut novel and the first novel in a trilogy – needs to be able to stand on its own as a complete, self-contained story. And the first third of my manuscript… decidedly did not stand on its own.

All of which to say, I had to go back to the proverbial drawing board. I drew a metaphorical line through my manuscript, picking a point just shy of one-third of the way through that could conceivably be an ending, of sorts. I sat down and started thinking. What would need to happen to make that sort-of-ending into a real ending that ticks the boxes for an “Epic Conclusion”? How could I take the basic outline, and tweak it here and there, to punch up that third-way ending?

And, lo-and-behold… I thought of something. I don’t want to get into details here, for obvious reasons, but it essentially amounted to trying to end the first third not with a whimper… but a BANG!

But a problem immediately arose. In order for this “Bang” to go off… well… other things would have to change. My main character would have to make different choices earlier in the book in order to end up in a position where this “Bang” moment makes any logical sense. And for my MC to make those choices, I’d need to give her new and different reasons to make them. Basically, to go from a small-e ending to a Big-E Ending, the changes just start to cascade through the whole first third of the book.

In fact, of the 95,500-words in the first third of the rough draft – up to the end of the scene where I drew my metaphorical line – I’m most likely keeping intact only about 79,000-words of the extant first draft (with some relatively minor clean-up and revisions, of course). The rest needs to be largely rewritten, and new material added congruent with the changes I’m making. Happily, this gives me a buffer of between 20,000 and 35,000 (max) words to produce that new material. I do believe I can make the relevant changes within that word count budget.

Of course, these new ideas have necessitated yet another revision of my outline. Which, I’m excited to report, I’ve already completed!

In fact, this weekend past, I actually, at last, began the process of writing the second draft. As I said… the writing work continues!

To commemorate this occasion, I’ve added a new progress bar to the sidebar of the blog, marking my progress toward a complete revision, the Second Draft of “The Book of M”.

Writing Year in Review: 2024

/ Stephen A. Watkins / 1 Comment

Number of Writing Weeks: 22 out of 52*

Total Word Count: 56,5 w17ords out of a goal of Finishing the Novel

Average Word Count Per Week: 1,088

% of Annual Word Count Goal: 100.0%

Other Stats: 44Writing Days*

Last year, during my 2023 writing recap summary, I wrote that it had been “unequivocally and without question, my single best year of writing productivity since I started tracking back in 2012″. And then 2024 came along. By every metric, 2024 basically blew 2023 out of the water. Not only did I write more in 2024, on a total word count basis, than I did in 2023… but I surpassed my 2023 word count total by roughly three-quarters of the year. I had more time to focus, and more dedication to my craft, and more motivation than ever before.

The real icing on the cake, however, is of course this: that I finished the rough draft of my long-in-progress novel project, “Book of M”. Which accounts for the “asterisks” in the above stats overview. As long-time readers of “The Undiscovered Author” may recall, I finished my rough draft in July of last year. And I’ve been riding that high ever since.

What I haven’t been doing since then: much, you know, honest-to-goodness writing. I took a break from writing work entirely for a couple weeks, then worked on transcribing a bunch of old handwritten notes and ideas – many of which were notes and background about the world and story of “Book of M”. Then I dove into reading my rough draft, making notes as I went. I reached a pausing point somewhere in, if I recall correctly, November-ish. Since then, I’ve been focused on re-outlining the novel in question, spending a good chunk of December and some of January 2025 on this new task.

Why, you may ask, am I re-outlining a finished novel? As I wrote in my last entry back in October, I’d come to the inevitable conclusion that “The Book of M”, at almost 300,000 words, is just too long for the current market. I’d initially been thinking I’d need to split it in two. Some feedback I got, on the other hand, suggested that three parts was more realistic for the current traditional publishing landscape – even for “Epic Fantasies”, which run a bit longer than most other genre formats. Basically, if I were to try to query this book as-written, I’d almost certainly be auto-rejected by every agent and publisher on the planet without another glance. If I’m going to get traditionally published (and honestly, I’ve neither the time, technical know-how, nor sufficient funding to self-publish it…) I need to figure out how to retell my story in a way that meets current market demands.

If I’m completely honest, I’ve been struggling to figure out how to approach this problem. I still see “The Book of M” as a single piece – one story from beginning to end – and I’ve yet had rather few bright ideas or moments of inspiration on how to split it effectively, and still land that “epic” feeling that an Epic Fantasy demands.

What does this fact have to do with re-outlining the novel? Well, I’m hopeful that in doing so, and reading the outline carefully, I’ll be able to ideate something new that will fulfill the demands of both the genre I’m writing, and the current traditional publishing landscape. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to share this outline with like-minded aspiring writers, to bounce ideas around, and really dig into it.

The challenge, of course? The first draft is over 297,000 words. Which means there’s a lot of story detail. Already, my new outline alone has surpassed over 25 written pages. I’ve already accepted that once I’m done re-outlining the novel, I’ll need to re-re-outline it, in a much more abbreviated format: I’m thinking something on the order of 3 pages is more in order. The longer, more detailed outline will still be there for those fellow writers who (a) are still happy to lend a helping hand and (b) are genuinely interested in the more thorough and detailed version.

That said, I’m pretty close to the end of this first run at re-outlining the novel. As of this writing, I’m about 85% of the way through my re-outline of the novel. About four to six hours more of dedicated writing-time, I estimate, and I should be done with my first-pass at the re-outlining process. The second-pass should go even faster.

So that’s the state of Stephen Watkins, Aspiring Fantasy Author, as of year-end 2024. If you’re reading this, and you’re interested in lending a hand and sort of beta-reading my outline, bouncing around ideas, and so on – reach out! You can find me on my Contact page.

“The Book of M” Reading Progress Update

/ Stephen A. Watkins / Leave a comment

Two-hundred pages.

In the past month, I’ve read two-hundred pages out of the 934 total pages in “The Book of M”. For those keeping track at home, that’s over 20% of the entire novel, and constitutes over 66,000 words of rough draft. I’ve made notes, highlighted things that need to change, and started thinking about how to crack down on the rough edges of dialog and dialog mechanics. This weekend, I printed out the next two-hundred pages, making four-hundred pages printed in total. My reading rate, admittedly, has slowed a bit, so that it’s probably unlikely that I finish reading the whole 297,000 words by year’s end. But I’m making solid progress.

I’m still surprised by how much of this is reads like good, useable work. Even when I started reading through scenes where I know I want to make some major changes to the way events played out, I’m finding that the vast majority of what I wrote… still works. Although I’ve promised that no one but myself will ever read this draft, pending those changes I wanted to make, somehow this all still gets me excited for the prospect of putting it in front of alpha readers.

In the mean time, I’ve continued to consider the problem of the length of this fictional beast. 297,000 words is just too long for a first-time author. I’ll never get it published as-is. But if most of what I wrote actually works and serves the larger plot – without too many pointless asides, dead-ends, etc. – then what do I do?

So far, in the first two-hundred pages, I haven’t found more than a few thousand words that I can outright cut from the manuscript. There’s one directionless point-of-view that I’ll probably cut. And a few sections from some of those scenes I wanted to change. But a lot of that will be replaced by new scenes in the second draft that solidify the new direction I’m taking.

I’ve therefore come to the uneasy conclusion that my dear wife was, inevitably, correct. I have to cut this beast in two. It’s two books I wrote, not just one. Yet the question still looms: if there’s only the one climax, at the end of the novel… exactly where do I cut it?

Actually, I’ve already identified a probable break-point where it seems likely that I’ll be able to insert a new climactic series of scenes. This probable break-point between the two books is set just a little after what I’ve now printed out: somewhere around page 445 or so. It comes on the heels of a scene that’s already high-action, and in which my protagonist completes a fairly significant chunk of her primary character arc. The problem remains, however: as-written, it’s not exactly a climax. It’s doesn’t feel like “The End”. It’s going to need a big change for it to work as the end of “Book 1”.

On the flip-side: if I can rewrite that part to work as a new ending for the book, I’ll be better than halfway done with a kick-ass sequel!

So yeah: I’m going to do it. I’m going to split this into two books. I don’t yet know how I’m going to rewrite that mid-point scene to read like a genuine climax to the novel. I don’t know how I’m going to wrap things up neat enough to present a completed package. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, figuring this thing out. But with enough creativity and good-old-fashioned elbow grease, I’m going to figure it out, and I’m going to do it.

Wish me luck!

Reading and Editing

/ Stephen A. Watkins / 1 Comment
The First 200 Pages of "The Book of M" with some initial editorial notes

Behold: the first 200 pages of “The Book of M” in printed manuscript format!

Note the highlighting and editorial comments…

The time has come. This past weekend, I began printing out and reading the full manuscript of “The Book of M”. All 297,000+ words of it. Formatted in Times New Roman 12-point font with 1.5 spacing and a footer for page numbers, it comes out to 934 pages. So the snapshot above represents just over 21% of the total manuscript in printed form.

I decided to physically print the manuscript in order – hopefully – to get a fresher perspective on the first draft than I would if I read it on the screen, and to spot things I know I’d miss if I were reading it electronically. But because it’s so huge, in terms of sheer page count, I have to take it in batches. I don’t want to jam my poor home printer!

So how’s the reading and editing process going, you ask? Well so far, as of this writing, I’ve read through 59 of the 200 pages printed. So in less than a week, I’ve read and made notes on some 20,000 words of my book – a far faster pace than what it originally took to write it all!

In those pages, I’ve caught quite a few very basic things, and asked myself a couple more provocative questions. But so far I haven’t unearthed any glaring issues with the manuscript. I know there are some coming up later in the document. Yet a lot of what I’ve written here at the beginning of the book feels, well, solid to me. With a few exceptions for some awkward phrasing here or there, it reads much better than I expected.

Note that although it’s been just over a month since I finished the first draft of “The Book of M”, it’s been over ten years since I looked closely at the first handful of scenes in the book: more than enough time has passed, I think, to be objective about the overall quality of what I’ve written. And, frankly, I’ve grown and changed a lot – both as a person and as a writer – in the ten-plus years since I wrote these words. That they hold up under closer scrutiny as well as they do is, frankly, surprising.

And actually… that I’m not making note of any major changes yet actually worries me. This book is quite the beast – but in the publishing world, Epic Fantasy Doorstoppers of this magnitude are a hard sell. I won’t lie: part of me was hoping I’d encounter big problems that would lead me to cut huge swaths of word count. But instead, I’m actually enjoying what I wrote. Which should be a good thing, right? But I’m also worried that I still lack the cold objectivity I need to fix issues that I am apparently too blind to see. So there’s that, in the back of my head. On the other hand – this is fun and exciting to be working on the novel again, and seeing some of it has me thinking “Oh, I wrote that? Hey, that’s great: it’ll do a good job of foreshadowing plot developments I know are coming later in the book.”

I know I still have a lot of work left ahead of me. And in the end, I’ll be the only living soul to read this draft of the book: I won’t be sharing this version with alpha- or beta-readers at all, until I’ve re-written a handful of big scenes (and character arcs) I already know are problematic. (I haven’t gotten to that part of the story in what I’ve read so far.)

After that: I’m both excited and terrified to hopefully share the next draft with a handful of alpha-readers. Excited, because I actually think it’s really good. Terrified, because I’m worried it’s actually not. And worried, because will I even be able to find readers willing to take on the task of providing reader comments on a behemoth of this size? Honestly, I’m not even sure where to start looking for readers. Which, I realize, is a problem for another day. First, I need to finish reading and making notes for changes to the next draft.

And hey! At the pace I’m reading so far, I stand a reasonable chance of finishing my read-through well before the end of the year. Then it’s on to the second draft! With a little wind in my sails, I could realistically finish the second draft by the end of 2025. I fully expect rewriting and editing to be a much faster process than writing the rough draft.

Once I have a firm second draft in place… then I’ll start to worry about finding alpha-readers to take a look at what I’ve written.