It has taken several starts and stops, reorganizations, and rewrites to reach this form. As it is now, I started writing Fantastic America: The Magic Unleashed from scratch in September of 2020. This blog has more or less kept pace with all of my excitement and frustrations along the way. If you’ve been here through that process, you know I’ve been learning as I went along.
My rough draft was ‘finished’ in October, and I took November away from the MS for Nanowrimo (to work on the next book in the series, Midwestern Magicians). F/A went through a professional developmental edit between Christmas and the end of January. From January till now I’ve been working through those edits, beta reader feedback, and chapter by chapter suggestions from my online critique group.
Tonight I reached another milestone, one that kind of caps off my efforts over the past three years. My goal in September was to write a 90K word contemporary fantasy novel. I came in way under that goal at 75K words on the page. Tonight, after a lot of writing and re-writing, I came in at 90,997 words. The book reads better, and I am overjoyed to have finally finished the book! (At least until an editor tells me differently – which I’d still be overjoyed to hear…)