I know it's been quite some time for me to post in my blog, despite my best intentions of keeping the Lake District series going. I do intend to get back on a regular posting schedule and finish it, but first I wanted to give an update on the editing for A Generation's Secrets, which is also the reason why I've been absent for a while.
Long story short, after all of the wonderful feedback people gave me during the online beta, I went to make edits to the manuscript, and something happened. The earlier edits were in the file, and the later edits were in the file, but there was a big chunk in the middle (including some pretty substantially rewritten scenes) that was gone.
I'm a fairly tech-savvy person and I went to check the version history and there was a huge time gap. I knew there was a time gap because I had been tracking what edits I had made in a Google spreadsheet, and there was a span of dates in the spreadsheet's version history that did not have corresponding dates in the Word doc. I have some theories as to what happened but suffice to say those edits were well and truly gone and would need to be rewritten.
I was pretty devastated by this, I'm not going to lie. The actual amount of work that was gone was not huge, but I had this feeling that I would never rewrite those sections the same way again, and that was tough to get past. So I took a little hiatus and did some arts and crafts in my spare time through the end of the year.
I am back at it now and have rewritten everything, and I'm nearly done with my first readthrough of the manuscript since. I'm not sure when it will be ready to publish although it's feeling fairly clean at this point (that might still mean months worth of readthroughs with a story of this length!).
When the pandemic first started I felt reasonably sure I would be able to finish the book by the end of 2020, with all the extra time I would be spending at home. I didn't account for the loss of work of course, but I also didn't realize just how long it would take to work my way through a book this long. It just takes extra time to do everything because it takes more than a week just to read through it.
So I'm pretty darn confident I will publish in 2021 given it's only January, but I have no idea what month it might go out. Watch this space, and I'll keep you all posted when it's closer to "typo squad" time and then actual publication.
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