The first draft of ‘The Fire Mages is now complete. It weighed in at 44 chapters, 151,000 words in the end, and took four and a half months to write, although only 90 days were actual writing days. Average amount written was almost 1,700 words per writing day. This is a big improvement on ‘The Plains of Kallanash’, where I managed only 1,000 words per writing day, and elapsed time was almost a year. Not sure whether I’m getting more productive, or this was an easier book to write. It’s certainly smaller (‘The Plains of Kallanash’ is 220,000 words).
What happens next? Some people would run it through a spell-checker and then put it up on Amazon, I suppose, but generally there’s a period of editing, revising, getting comments from beta readers, more editing, lather rinse repeat. I’m not particularly bothered about publishing anything at this stage, so I’m going to follow the same policy as with ‘The Plains of Kallanash’, which is to leave it to brew for at least three months, not opening it at all. Then I’ll reread from the beginning and see whether it’s worth editing. If it is, it will be posted to Scribophile chapter by chapter. Then and only then will I have some idea of whether the end result is readable.
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