Good news! The Zafiil rewrite is done! And as I expected, it’s so large it’s going to need to be published in two volumes, each of which will be about the size of Even the Wingless, which… was not a small book. I feel scooped out. I finished this novel (I thought) in 1996, tried to sell it, got nowhere, went on to write two decades’ worth of canon that assumed it existed… then decided to unearth it, edited the first 40% of it, discovered the last 60% was no longer consistent with published work, trashed that 60% and rewrote it from scratch. Which gets us to this moment right now, when this second draft? Rewrite? Is complete.
Editing it isn’t going to be the work of a week, the way it usually is. I’m guessing I’ll need at least two or three, because everything needs doublechecking, from the meta-universal (“did I refer to this personage in a published novel and if so did I get the reference right”) to the copy-editorial (“should all the words be mid-capitalized because some of them are? Should it be MindFire because it’s WisdomDancer?”). I’ll have a long list of things I want to check before I think of handing it over to first readers, and there are entire sections where I left chunks out of the manuscript because I wanted to maintain momentum (“what season is it? Oh who cares, don’t talk about where they are at all, I can add that later”).
This is one of those stories that’s going to grow as I edit it.
My plan is to leave it for a few weeks, and return fresh in mid-April/late April, with the goal of publishing both volumes in late May. That’s your warning if you want to first-read. If you’ve been reading along with my updates when I was still posting them, some of the draft will be the same, but as I said, the story’s going to grow, so the second time around it might be different. (Thank you for those first comments though, I've already incorporated them! Invaluable, as always.)
As exhausted as I am, I am so glad I did this, and not just because it restores and makes available to readers an important piece of the Peltedverse’s historical context. Zafiil was the very first novel I finished as a “grown-up”, as College Me considered herself even when she was still in her teens. And it was an incredibly ambitious project for someone that age. Rescuing it from the dusty recesses of my hard drive was an opportunity to have a conversation with that younger, more idealistic me, and realize she’s still in here, along with all the Mes I’ve become since. I can’t wait to share her story with you.
But! I have got to let this one rest. Like bread, it needs to proof while I do something else. And I have no idea what that something else is, yet! I still plan to do the unicorn kickstarter in summer, but I don’t want to pre-write for that… the fun of those campaigns is that you don’t know if the bonus stories are going to be written! If they’re already written and I’m dangling them out of reach, waiting for the money to arrive, I feel like I’ve stopped being the heroine and become the villain of the piece. XD So I don’t want to work on that.
I’ll probably shake out my project list and see what feels like a good fit for my mood. I don’t particularly want to do a Peltedverse book yet, but I’ve got some non-PV partials waiting (Coracle 2, GameLit Standalone), and an unfinished Jokka story that I could finish up… which reminds me that there are three Jokka stories not yet in a collection, so maybe I could do a couple more of those stories and make a sequel to Clays Beneath the Skies? Not sure I’m in a Jokka place, though. I definitely want to try to add to/tidy up the wiki, though, because that’s relaxing work that will help with editing later.
I guess what I’m saying is that the next few weeks will be ‘take it as it comes’. Then I’ll dive into Zafiil edits, and hopefully come out of it in late May with two hefty new books for your enjoyment. That'll give me four books published this year so far (Discover and Preserve, Good Company, and these two volumes), and since my goal was six this year I'm in good shape.
This was a huge project that was eating up a lot of writing cycles, and I’m really excited. Or I will be when I’m not so ready to flop!
