Edit... Edit... Edit... The new year begins with me just over 30% through my first full edit of Shadows of the Knight - my first novel. I expect the editing processing to continue on for a few more months before I arrive at the first draft I deem ready for 'external consumption'. At that time, I'll release the draft to a select list of friends to receive the first round of critiques. After that, I will no doubt engage in a few months of additional editing before converting my draft to manuscript format to test the publishing waters for the first time.
Shadows of the Knight is the first book in my planned saga that will span at least four or five books. Most of the major plots, subplots and characters for the remaining books were outlined before I began writing the first book but will continue to evolve as I write and edit. As vampire fiction, the books seem to be best classified as "urban fantasy" although I struggle to find any book or series that I would closely compare them to. I hope readers will find them both entertaining and somewhat original.
My SOTK draft is currently 387 pages in MS Word but at over 237k words, it will be much larger in formal manuscript and book formats. As I am still fleshing out some chapters during the initial editing process, I expect the final draft to land somewhere in the neighborhood of the largest of the Harry Potter novels. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was 870 pages with 257,045 words. At that rate, SOTK would currently translate to an 805 page novel.
