Much More with the Invasion Novel

Blog Post No. 508

If you thought I was done talking about the Invasion Novel just because I finished it (and maybe suggested that I wouldn’t be talking about it as much) you were dead wrong. I’ve just been in a holding pattern waiting for Christian to wrap up the first review of the chunky book and working on short stories in the interim. (I’m just finishing off the last one that I had started since I’d like to submit it for a collection at the end of the month).

Once that short is out of the way, though, I’m diving headlong into a sprint, making some changes and going over the suggestions Christian made (and the line edits he caught but that’s not as important at this stage). I really appreciate the time he took to go over the book. It’s a long one so it really pushed back the things he’d been working on.

He made some big picture suggestions that I’ve been mulling over the last few days and, while it’ll set back my timetable a bit, I think making some changes based on his notes is best for the story. My plan was to have a clean enough draft ready to send out for queries by September, but I want a lot more feedback before I sent it out into the wide world, so September is out.

Now, I’m hoping to do a pretty speedy edit of the book in the next few weeks, working on it every day the way I do a first draft. I think I may need two passes to implement a couple of the changes I want to make. The story wont be radically different, but I hope to give the main character a stronger motivation and make him look a little more capable (but not so much that he’s annoying).

Once I finish this draft, I’m going to sent it off to the next batch of beta readers. There are some changes that Christian suggested that I’m not totally sold on, so I’m hoping there will be a consensus one way or another. I need more people to find more issues, too. You can’t have too many people finding mistakes and making you feel like a failure as a writer (even though in your heart you know that’s just the way writing books works).

So, I don’t have a concrete date for when I’m going to call it finished and sent it out to agents. I don’t want to rush things, but I don’t want to drag my feet either. It’ll be done when it’s done and while I’m waiting for feedback I’ll either keep working on short stories or maybe, eventually, I’ll get started on the next novel (the Salvage Novel). Only time will tell.

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