I finished the first draft of my current novel in October, after nine months of drafting. It weighs in at 90k words, with an additional 10k words that I’ve decided should go into the sequel. The working title is To Warp Fate, and it’s a planetary heist adventure featuring smugglers and space wizards.
I spent several years feeling very unmotivated to write after I published Razor Strike. I worked on a sequel before eventually shelving 40k words. I also wrote 80k words of a first draft of a visual novel and then revised the first 25k. Then I shelved that because I didn’t think I’d feel satisfied taking the visual novel through several more rounds of drafts.
I’m happy to say I wrote a draft this time that I look forward to revising. The inspiration for To Warp Fate came from several places, including a Starfinder TTRPG campaign and the Love and Deepspace gacha visual novel. So maybe this is fan fiction. Maybe not? I filed most of the serial numbers off.
When I finished the first draft of Razor Strike, I knew I had plenty of parts I needed to fix, but I wasn’t sure what they were or in what order to tackle them. I ended up taking a class at Grub Street by Randy Susan Meyers in person and a longer class by Holly Lisle online (Lisle died last year, so I’m not sure if the classes are still running with someone else’s instruction). They gave me a set of tools that took a while for me to get comfortable with, but I’m ready to use them again.
This time, the prose is rubbish, some of the scenes need to be refactored, and there’s a ton of world-building information that isn’t in the draft. But that means I know most of what I need to do. My tentative goal is to have the second draft ready by the beginning of July. Wish me luck!