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The progress report is good news this month. As I type this in the last few hours of August, I have 100,000 words rewritten for GIBRALTAR STARS and only 20,000 words to go. With luck, the book will be essentially done by September 7. After that, there are a few weeks of proofreading before producing the eBooks and initial trade paperbacks.
During the rewrite process, I have taken out 11% of the words in the first draft. As I have told a few of my email correspondents, this really doesn't tell the story. For many chapters, I read them and they just feel right! (Note to neophyte authors: You know it's good when it begins to feel like something you would like to read. It's no more complicated than that.) With these "good" chapters, I typically remove 2% of the words, although I sometimes add about the same amount back in.
Then there are the chapters that just don't "feel right." Typically, they feel slow, disjointed, and bloated. These are typical of first draft chapters. That is because writing takes so much longer than reading that you forget you told the readers something a mere thirty pages before, so you tell them again. Your sentences are full of subordinate clauses, asides, and strings of adjectives. You also discover that you are writing in a subjunctive past tense a couple of tenses removed from where you want to be. The dead giveaway to this is when you find yourself writing "had had", "had begun", "had seen to it"...
Second writing tip of the evening: When you come to the word "had," see if you can remove it without damaging the sentence!
For these lesser chapters, I find I typically remove between 20% of the words for the "not too bad" chapters and 33% of the words for the "really stink" chapters. What I find amazing is that you can remove one out of three words from a chapter and not only NOT lose its meaning, but actually make it feel taut in the process.
I make no promises, but I have tentatively set the release date for GIBRALTAR STARS as October 1, 2009.
And to short circuit the inevitable emails asking me, "Can i pre-order now?", the answer is no. It isn't that I don't want to take your money. It's just that my bookkeeping system isn't good enough to keep track of it all and still finish the book on time.
Patience is a virtue, you know.
Michael McCollum
Tempe, AZ
August 31, 2009