It's been a while since I blogged, mainly as I've been a bit busy. So here I am, popping my head up, to wave hello and confirm I haven't dropped off the planet. Much like a meerkat, hence the title of this post and the accompanying photo. Also, because meerkats are cute.
As I posted last month, I recently signed a two-book deal with Angry Robot, meaning that a new novel, The Ravening, will be published next November, and a third, The Sound of the Dark, in 2025. Over the last month or two, I've been working on both: writing the first draft of The Sound of the Dark, while rewriting The Ravening for Simon Spanton, my editor at Angry Robot.
The current state of play on The Sound of The Dark is a word count of around 115,000, with four chapters still to write; there'll be various edits and rewrites between now and the end which will pare the count down as I go, but I'm thinking it'll probably end up around the 120k mark.
I finished the first draft of The Ravening last July, and it came in at around 111,000 words. Since then, it's had feedback from various trusted readers, bringing it down to about 110,000 words.
After that it went on my Kindle for a final readthrough, which whittled the wordcount down to 103,000 words.
(That kind of extensive cutting's pretty rare for me at that stage, but boy this book had a difficult birth!)
That's what the book goes through before my agent gets to see it; following her feedback, further changes were made, and a manuscript of 106,750 words was sent to Angry Robot.
There were bunch of tweaks to make - some big, some tiny, but all designed to make The Ravening the best book it could possibly be. I saved the biggest of them - two chapters I needed to scrap and rewrite from scratch - today.
It's a strange feeling, after having lived with a big job like that for so long, for it to be over.
Although I have one last thing to do with The Ravening, which is to stick it on my Kindle for one final readthrough and ensure it still makes sense. After that, it'll go off to Angry Robot for final approval (fingers crossed.)
That leaves The Sound of the Dark to complete before my self-imposed deadline of the end of October. Once that's finished, it'll go off to my beta readers... and the whole process begins again!
At which point, hopefully, I'll start another book. :)
And on that note, I'd better head back down my burrow. I'm giving myself the rest of the afternoon off, so I really should make the most of it.
See you next time,
Daniel :)