#aktctl

hi anon! this WIP is an original and it's one i've been working on since 2016. i have rewritten the opening section maybe 25-30 times. in total i think i have written upward of half a million words for it. and a couple weeks ago i started redrafting from a blank page ... again. lmao.

the issue is, this year i finally realized it doesn't make sense as YA. firstly, i think for the thing to feel full and fleshed-out and satisfying it's going to have to be well upward of 200k words, which is totally unsellable in YA. (... for someone with my sales record lol. bestsellers can do whatever they want)

anyway, for the past five years i've been collapsing these large stretches of character development into tiny little chapters. and i am FINALLY just letting go of that and saying, ok look, it is just going to be slow and character-driven in a way that is atypical for fantasy, it has to be microscopically focused on the details of the main character's messed-up life.

I FINISHED THE REVAMP OF FANTASY PROJECT!!

i wrote the first draft of this thing back in 2016 and have been working on it on and off since then. although parts of this are literally on a thirtieth draft, this feels like the first real complete draft. one that isn’t, you know, structurally broken in eight thousand ways. like a foundation upon which i can do actual valuable editing!!

this means that i basically........ can’t work on it for a while

;D it’s short for the title of my new project, dear anon!

by “new” i here mean that i’ve been working on it since mid-2016, lmao, but this time, this draft, it’s For Real. this is the epic fantasy series opener i’ve been hammering away at–i want it perfect.

anon!! this is such a nice thing to ask, thank you for your interest! alas, thing is, with my original fiction i have a circle of critique partners that hasn’t changed in years. i don’t send my work to anybody besides them, my agent, or editors until there are proof copies in the months leading up to publication. i am simply too neurotic about editing.

Hahahah I definitely will, but it’ll be a while! I haven’t even sent it to my agent yet, so she needs to read it, and then I need to edit it based on her feedback & my beta readers’ feedback, and then we need to go through submissions to publishing houses. Optimistically, I’d like to get this thing out on submission next spring.