December Update on "Into the North"

With a book tour scheduled for late spring, I've temporarily put all other projects on hold as I work furiously to get the sequel to The Beast Hunter ready for publication. The first draft was completed a while ago, and I'm working on the second draft revisions now. Things were going well at first, and I even managed to get a whole week ahead of schedule. And then I hit a snag.

I had planned to try a different revision strategy for this book. While I never outline my stories before writing them, I decided to try outlining the plot as it appeared in the first draft. The idea was that I could then use my outline to see the plot all at once and make large-scale edits quickly and efficiently. Once the outline had been fully revised, I would be able to use it as a road map for the rest of the second draft. That was the plan.

What happened was that I struggled just to create the outline in the first place. I had to read the entire first draft manuscript to create a beat-by-beat description of the plot, forcing myself to ignore all of the mistakes and problems that my editor's eye kept noticing. To placate myself, I kept a notebook nearby that was soon half-filled with notes of places that would need fixing later. Things got even harder after finishing the outline.

I quickly found a significant flaw in my plan as soon as I started making revisions to the outline. Whenever I made a correction early on in the manuscript, I found that I wasn't able to make any corrections later in the draft because I didn't know how the earlier change might affect the story. If I added a new character in chapter five, what would they be doing to affect the story in chapter fourteen? Since I'm not a natural outliner, I found the process of trying to anticipate my creative mind to be frustrating, time-consuming, and ultimately hopeless.

After reaching out to several friends for advice, I decided to chuck the outline and start revising the actual manuscript, using my notebook of suggested edits to jump-start the process. While I'm disappointed to have lost so much time to the outline, I'm glad to say that the second draft is finally coming along, and I'm very happy with the changes I'm making.

I'll be sure to give another update as we get closer to the release date. Big thanks to all of my fans and friends for their support and enthusiasm!