Two Magic Words: The End

Man, those are two words every writer loves to type at the end of a project. Especially one that’s been with me for as long as SoulQuest has.

It’s funny, actually. Two years ago was the last time I finished writing a book, and that was Dragon Kings of the Orient. I haven’t been writing non-stop ever since, in fact when Dragon Kings of the Orient was released last year, some may recall that I said it might actually be my last book as I was struggling with writing.

I finally decided to get back onto the horse in October and I used NaNoWriMo to help me get started. The project I began work on was titled The Legacy of Frankenstein and it started off good, but quickly hit a brick wall around 16,000 words. At that point, I decided to take another look at SoulQuest, which I had about 10,000 words written for already.

SoulQuest, some readers may remember, began life as a comic book project. The initial artist I tailored the project for stopped responding to e-mails, but I later found a new artist named Frank Jensen. Frank was initially very excited about the project and did a lot of character designs and gave some plot input as well. Then history repeated itself and he also stopped responding to e-mails.

For about two years I didn’t give SoulQuest any more thought, until a friend of mine began a website for original, serialized fiction. I dusted off SoulQuest and decided to do it as a monthly serial novel. The plan was to release a chapter a month online for free and once the entire thing was finished, to take it down and release it as a full novel.

The site, however, fell through before the second chapter was released. And while I attempted to make some more progress on it, it mostly stalled. But when I hit the wall with The Legacy of Frankenstein, I took another look at SoulQuest and felt the desire to jump back into it. That was around mid-November/December and now I’ve finally completed it.

The project’s goals have shifted a lot. Originally I aimed for 50,000 words. Then that became 60,000. Then 65,000, then 70,000 and 75,000. And the book topped out, as you can see from the little guy in the Writertopia image, at 78,440 (by the way, the beer he’s holding is prophetic, that’s definitely what I’ll be doing tonight!).

And it’s not even close to finished. As any writer will tell you, completing the first draft is just the beginning. Next comes the revision process. Normally I’m pretty good about self-editing as I go along, but this time I just went full-speed to complete this draft. And now that it’s done, I know that I’ve got a lot of revisions to do before I send it off to my editor. For instance, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I made the decision halfway into the book that one of the characters was superfluous so I decided to cut him. I have to remove all references to him in the beginning. I also have to change around a few other things.

But first, I need to put it aside for a bit. Editing and revising can be a tough process, and you want to let some time set before jumping right into it so the book isn’t so fresh in your mind. Besides, I’ve got ideas brewing for my next project that I really want to start developing into a full-fledged outline.