Books by Tom Reeve


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The Gray Shift Edits are Back!

I got the edits on my full draft of The Gray Shift back from my editor two weeks ago and I finished going through all 291 pages of commented/redlined Word doc this past week.

My favorite comment is: “When the bisected torso hits the windshield, I would love for readers to jump out of their skin (metaphorically, of course). But to do that, the writing will need to be more cinematic. Traye rubbing his neck and saying don’t do that again is pretty funny, actually.

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The Gray Shift: Second Draft Complete!

Today I finished the second draft of my next book, The Gray Shift! The story is now structurally complete and I don’t anticipate making any more big plot changes to it. I do plan on doing on more edit pass on it before sending it out to beta readers but that will be to mainly fix/update character names and to flesh out any descriptors as well as to make sure everything is consistent.

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The Gray Shift: First Draft in Progress!

I made a few changes to my outline and got the ok to proceed on the actual text for The Gray Shift from my editor at the end of last year. The current outline (v4 to my editor, Rev 08 by my internal “story iteration” numbering scheme) is 21,695 words long and covers 40 chapters.

I am in the midst of writing the first draft of the full book now. Right now I’ve got 7 chapters out of 40 written (~17.5% complete) and I’m aiming for 2 chapters per day when I focus on writing. At this rate it should take me about 3-4 more weeks to finish this first draft.

One issue that came up when I started calculating how many words I actually need to write is that this book may turn out to be a bit longer than I was aiming for. A typical chapter has between 3,000-5,000 words per chapter. Full Coverage has 47,720 words spread over 17 chapters, an average of 2,807 words per chapter. If I kept that same average for this book I’d wind up with a 112,280 word book that would be around 470 pages long. That’s a bit longer than I want, which is to be in the 80k-100k word range for a 350-400 page book. To try and keep the overall length down each individual chapter will probably be closer to 2,000 words each. That should hopefully keep the pace fast even though there are more than twice as many chapters in The Gray Shift as were in my first book.

Right now the seven chapters in this first draft average out to 1,331 words each. I’m keeping it pretty thin on detailed descriptions for this first time around just to get the entire thing down and then I’ll flesh it out with more details and better descriptions of the smells/sights/sounds/sensations as I go back through and edit it. I tend to add stuff each time I go back and edit something so hitting ~2,000 words per chapter in the next two passes shouldn’t be a problem.

So far I’m averaging a speed of 1,119.05 words per hour, so I can get a decent chunk of text done in a full day. If I stay at my current 1,331 words/chapter average that comes out to 43,923 words left to write for my crappy first draft, which is about 39.25 hours of actual dedicated writing time to finish this first draft.

Once that first draft is done, I’ll go back through it twice to edit it. I usually edit faster than I write but since I’ll be filling in placeholders and descriptions these first two times I’ll assume I stick to the same speed. If the target length is between 80k-100k words long, that should take between 71.5-89.4hrs each. That gives me around 218 hours of work to do before I’m ready to send a draft out to my editor and my beta readers. It’s not a short amount of time, but it’s a finite one and I have an auto-updating Excel sheet to track all this so my estimates will get better and the time to edit should get shorter with each pass.

In Summary, here are the next steps:

  1. First Draft: ~39.25 hours to go
  2. Second Draft: ~89.4 hours to go
  3. Third Draft: ~89.4 hours to go
  4. Send Out Third Draft to Editor and to Beta Readers!
  5. While Editor and Beta Readers are Reading:
    • Make Cover Art
    • First Draft of Outline for The Unsettled Compromise (the sequel to The Gray Shift)

My best guess right now is that I’ll have a third draft edit ready for my editor an beta readers sometime in April. It’s not very soon, but it’s not super far away either. 😱 I’m slowly getting there!


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The Gray Shift (v3) Outline Edits Are Back

I got the edits for the v3 draft of my outline for The Gray Shift back last week and it’s definite improvement over the previous draft. The breakdown of the 41 chapters is:

  • 13 chapters ok as is! (31.7%)
  • 15 chapters need minor edits. (36.6%) These were things like adding/removing characters or moving the “cymbal crash” moment a line or two around.
  • 11 chapters need major changes. (26.8%) These are mainly in the chapters in between the pivotal moments in the middle.
  • 2 chapters need to be deleted (4.9%)
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The Gray Shift Outline (v3) is Out for Editing!

I completed the third draft of the outline for The Gray Shift last week and it is now out for editing. This is the third version I’ve sent to my awesome editor and this has some pretty major changes to the characters and tone that I think make it work a lot better. I should get the edits back in a few weeks and if everything looks good to go then I’ll start on writing the first draft of the full book after that.

This version of the outline is 41 chapters and 21,802 words, an average of 531 words per chapter, which is pretty close to my target of 500 words per chapter for the outline.

Now that this outline is out for editing I’m resuming work on outlining the sequel, which will be called The Unsettled Compromise since I want to launch these next two a month apart. Current status on all books is below:

The Gray Shift: 3rd draft of the outline out for editing
The Unsettled Compromise: (This is the sequel to The Gray Shift) 1st draft of the outline in progress
Full Coverage 2: Fuller Coverage: (This is not the real title, the real title involves πŸ₯“ πŸ˜‰) Occasionally brainstorming and adding notes/ideas to OneNote but not actively working on it yet.


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The Gray Shift Outline Edits Are Back

I got the edits back on the outline for The Gray Shift last week. Things are improved over the first draft but there’s still a lot of work to do. About 1/3rd of the story is good to go but I need to re-think the beginning and how things interconnect a bit. Progress is slowly inching forward but that’s what drafts are for and it gets better each time!

Part of the problem seems to be that I put too much into the outline so I’m going to try and limit myself to around 10,000 words on the next outline to make sure I get the core correct faster and move the details to a separate notes file on the side. That should help me tweak things faster.

I’m also about 2/3rd of the way through the first draft outline of The Unsettled Compromise. That’s on hold now but I’ll come back to it after finishing the rework on The Gray Shift so I can apply those learnings to this outline too!