I’ve had a few emails and questions come up about the fact that the progress bar for Alayne’s Story seems “stuck” at 100%. There’s a few reasons for that.
1) I post the updates on Fridays and generally don’t reset the progress bar until Saturday (I’m a lazy sot sometimes).
2) I have a strict routine on Saturdays of sleeping until 10 am, getting up, getting dressed, having a smoke, and then firing up the computer and working on things. I generally add a few pages to Alayne’s Story during this period. After lunch, I’ll finish working on things for my guild’s site, play some WoW, and then get back to writing.
3) I consider five pages added to be 100% for the week since my weekly updates are slightly over/under five pages.
4) By the time I finish writing on Saturday, I’ve generally added six or seven pages to Alayne’s Story. So, 100% done!
On The Unexiled: no, it’s not been forgotten. I’ve been working on it piecemeal as I found time between Alayne’s Story, raiding, work, and other projects. I’m happy to say that I just hit a major milestone on it and am at about the 60% mark. I’m planning to revisit my schedule a bit and work on Alayne’s Story on Saturday, The Unexiled on Sunday and alternate them during the week a bit. I generally don’t do too much writing during the week nowadays because of work and raiding.
Now, I’m not going to send out The Unexiled until it’s finished. But, I’ve decided to revamp my stance on it a bit and will send out copies to people who meet the following criteria:
1) Avid fantasy readers. And by “avid” I mean “voracious.”
2) Fluent in English (this will not apply for all native speakers).
3) Have some professional editing experience.
When I send it out, I’m going to be looking for a critical read. I’m going to be looking for people who can spot typos, grammar errors, and plot problems. Attached to the draft will be a glossary defining made-up words so that those are not marked as spelling errors unless they’re internally inconsistent (ex: E’lei’anshu is correct but El’eian’shu is a typo).
So, if you meet that criteria and are interested, keep an eye on the progress bar and on this space. When you see it hit 100% and you see a post that says “I finally finished the fucking thing!” shoot me an email with your proof of points 1, 2, and 3 and I’ll send you the draft after I finish my initial pass.
And now, back to work!
