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Today I sent a draft of The Sea Queen to my agent. It is 193,000 words long or 650 double spaced 12pt Times New Roman pages in MS Word. I love reading long novels, so it’s not surprising I would like to write them too, but DANG. That is long.
This is a huge milestone because this is only the second novel I’ve ever finished to the point where I am willing to let someone else read it from beginning to end.
Steps so far:
- Very rough outline
- Write 70% of the rough draft (120,000 words)
- Re-outline with much more detail
- Re-write/write first draft (170,000 words)
- Let sit for 2 weeks
- Read quickly, make notes about overall structure
- Do slow, detailed edit from beginning (193,000 words)
- Do quicker read-through for typos and infelicitous sentences
- Send to agent!
It is due July 2017 to my editor at HarperCollins. At that point it might still need a few edits but it should be mostly ready for copy-editing. The Sea Queen will probably be released in Summer 2018. My next steps, I hope:
- Agent reads it and gives me big picture feedback
- I make changes based on that feedback
- Repeat these steps as necessary
- Send to editor
- Editor reads it and gives me big picture feedback
- I make changes based on that feedback
- Repeat these steps as necessary
I probably won’t get feedback on The Sea Queen for several weeks, so I’m going to take a few days off, then maybe do a rough outline of the final book, The Golden Wolf, and then maybe dive into a novel I have mostly complete that is not part of this trilogy. I don’t want to do too much work on the third book when plot aspects of book 2 may change a lot.