The Heron Kings Rampant is Finished!!!
UPDATE July 22: After three rounds of edits, I just sent the final revised, polished draft off to my editor. Word count 109, 673. That’s all folks, The Heron Kings trilogy is FINISHED. And none too soon. I am so, so tired. Now to wait about eight months with fingers crossed…
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This will be a very short entry, mostly just to mark the day and approximate time that I finished the first draft of my third novel, The Heron Kings Rampant. May 1, 2022 at 7pm. The draft stands at just under 110,000 words. I really didn’t expect to finish today, especially since I spent a lot of yesterday writing articles in promotion of Book #2, The Heron Kings’ Flight which comes out in about two weeks. But I started and just kept going, and as I felt the end getting nearer I just didn’t want to stop. I wrote…wait for it…7,469 words today! That is by far a record, but it was easy because I’ve been formulating the ending for a long time, and it was just the formality of typing it out. I started at about 8:00 this morning, enjoying an egg, avocado, onion & pepper jack bagel sandwich and black coffee as I wrote, and hit the final save button at 6:21 this evening. Whew! This will almost certainly be the final Heron Kings book, as I’ve fully told every part of the story I wanted to tell, and I feel satisfied with what the saga has become. This one took a long time to write, almost two years from start to finish, although the majority was written in the last seven months. You can read a draft of the first chapter here.
I still have lots of rewriting, editing and revising to do, more than for my second book, but probably less than for the first. But this step is usually easier for me, since I find it easier to fix an imperfect product than to face a blank page. I now know what the story is, so I can go back and set things up before paying them off, foreshadow, fix things that don’t work, plot threads that go nowhere and all that fun stuff. It’s a lot like time travel I guess. And there’s no telling if the story will ever even get published, which depends entirely on factors out of my control. But for tonight, I’m done. I think I’ll have a glass of mead…
