I spent some long days and nights grinding through the whole manuscript of Through the Stone Gate, and I am happy to say I have a new revised version I’m fairly happy with. Thanks to the input of everyone who took some time to read the first draft, I was able to correct a bunch of contradictions, iron out some inconsistencies and even spell the characters names the same way from chapter to chapter. It is a significant improvement.
The book is slightly shorter now. It comes in at around 110,000 words. I’m told is close to 350 book pages. This is actually shockingly close to the target I had for this book when I set out. That said, I originally thought this first book was going to end quite a bit later in the bigger story… so what do I know?
I am beginning to understand that a large part of writing a book people will want to read is just a willingness to do the work. It is impossible to write this many words over the course of this many months and have it come out anywhere close to finished, or at least it is for me. There is no doubt you need a good idea and you have to have some talent for stringing words together, but those are only going to get you so far. In the end it comes down to work.