After a longer than intended break I’ve gotten back into the writing habit and made some progress on the second draft of my next book, The Gray Shift. I also discovered some interesting things about Word 365’s views on profanity.

As of now I’ve completed a 2nd pass edit on 17 out of 39 chapters and 29,978 words. Right now that is 52.3% of the 57,315 words currently in this draft, but I expect to get around 65k or so by the end of this pass since I’m fleshing out a lot of dry text so I’m probably really closer to ~46% done so far. So far I’ve added 5,714 words to the first draft count of 51,601. I’ve also fixed a few chapters that didn’t quite feel right so the whole thing should flow better now.

My current plan going forward is:

1. Finish the 2nd pass edit to fix the rough parts of the story and flesh things out a bit
2. Do a 3rd pass edit to double check and tweak descriptions and names to flesh them out and make sure they are consistent. This pass should go faster than the story edit pass.
3. Send out the 3rd draft to beta testers and my awesome editor
4. Make the cover art using Inkscape and Nick Saporito’s awesome tutorials
5. Work on the outline for the sequel, The Unsettled Compromise

Right now I’m aiming to get the beta test draft out by the end of the year.

While editing my first draft, I ran into some amusing suggestions from Word regarding some of my word choices:

First off, Word doesn’t like making people “pissed off”

Word also doesn’t like calling people assholes

But if things are fucked up, Word wants to help you make sure they are “fucked-up” properly