I’m in the final pages of the third draft of Farewell to Kindness. From this point on, almost every row in my plot-line spreadsheet has notes in the ‘needs work’ column. I’ve been averaging 35 pages an hour (the train trip to and from work takes an hour, so it’s easy to work out), but today’s output was six pages. Still, I have another trip tonight, and then the weekend.

Next, I do a final check for filter words and egregious spelling errors, and format it for the beta readers.

I have a whole lot of super people who have volunteered to read the novel and tell me what they think. I’m pretty nervous, but very excited.

While it’s with the beta readers, I plan to leave it alone, apart from writing the artistic brief for the cover and book trailer.

Oh, yes, and rewriting the book blurb on this site and on Goodreads.

I don’t expect any of those to take long, and I’ll mainly be focusing on the next writing projects.

I want to write Candle’s Christmas Chair (a short story or novella, depending on how much I write, that I want to have ready to give away for Christmas). And, if I’m to have the first chapters in the back of Farewell to Kindness, I need to finish the chapter outlines and main character sketches for Encouraging Prudence and A Raging Madness.

So no boredom on the horizon yet, then.

In January, I plan to do any changes that come out of the beta read, then read the whole book aloud into a recording App on my iPad. This will let me be my own reader/listener for a complete copy edit, which can be my train-time project for January. I’ll send it for a professional proofread once I’ve done my own copy edit. And then whole heap more jobs to actually publish. I’ve got a little list. (But, if you’ve been reading my blog, you will have guessed that.)