Another Done

I finished the final edit of Assignment Day on Saturday morning. For anyone keeping score, that’s two books in the can and ready to publish.

This book was the toughest to write so far, but I think the end result turned out very well. Last summer I did some major rewriting since I didn’t like the way it was going. That proved to be the right decision. When I’m the one writing it and I don’t like it…well, that’s a bad sign.

I feel like I did quite a bit of self-diagnosing along the way as to what worked and what didn't. At the risk of being completely wrong, I think experience helped tons in that regard. Also, having gone through the previous book with an editor gave me ideas of what to spot. For example, one of the characters was supposed to be a hacker, but I didn’t have anything earlier in the story to display those skills. I remedied that in order to make the later scenes believable. Consistency with some of the technology was also a point I found I needed to fix.

I’ll write more here about the experience in the near future.

In the meantime, what’s next?

With two books ready to go, I need to redouble my efforts to get them published. Otherwise, I’m just going to end up with a bunch of books nobody but my family reads.

Beyond that, the next project is to do my first edit on Next Time. I’ll probably start with rounding out the character sketches and listing the elements I know need to be addressed in edit mode. That should keep me occupied into next month.