My read-through progress slowed considerably over the last week or two, and not for any reason I can readily identify. With the past three days off from work in the run-up to wedding weekend, I have been able to make considerable progress, getting through about 220 of 275 pages.

Luckily, I still have a few hours today to work before seeing some friends/family in town tonight, our rehearsal walk-through and dinner tomorrow, and, oh right, The Wedding on Sunday. And then Monday it’s off to the Big Easy! So yeah, I’d sure like to finish that read-through before Future Wife evolves into Present Wife and we disappear for a week.

Despite my sluggish pace, I am still quite enjoying my first read-through of my manuscript. I feel like the notes I’m taking are building a solid foundation for my actual revision plan.

As it stands, I will be spending most of October reviewing the marked-up manuscripts from my alpha readers to get a feel for their thoughts and ideas. I will also be fleshing out a full outline for part two of my Warden of Everfeld  duology to tackle for National Novel Writing Month in November. This will be my first NaNo working on a project other than WoEM, so I’m excited to dive into a new story with some returning characters. I’ll just refer to it as WoE2 for now.

I’ve also been eager to connect with my alpha readers again. From the sounds of it, most of them are finished or nearly finished with the read-throughs and the questions I assigned them, and I cannot wait to delve into their thoughts and then share my germinating ideas for WoE2 with them.

I have kept The Warden of Everfeld: Memento pretty close to the vest over the last year or so, sharing only snippets of my story with select friends and far less with all of you. The most valuable lesson I have learned from the alpha manuscript process is how to allow others to see my work. As a writer, I think it’s easy to tell people about the progress you have made on a novel and let them congratulate you on your diligence. But letting other people, who have their own ideas and their own opinions, read your  work that you have poured yourself into for years… That’s damn hard to do.

So, I’d like to start revealing more about my revision process and about the story itself over the next few months. That will be part of my new series on marketing, but also other features that are in the works.

I’ll have posts scheduled for next week while i’m on my honeymoon, but I will mostly be absent from the blogosphere for the next week and a half. Enjoy yourselves, and keep writing.

Steve D