Souldancer Rewrite Update

For those who are just joining us, I recently finished the final manuscript for my sci fi-fantasy novel Nethereal. That book's completion followed a rather crooked path since I'd already written its sequel, entitled Souldancer, almost ten years before.

Now that the first (in narrative terms) book is done I'm taking another shot at the second. It needs a lot of work to say the least. Weighing in at a staggering 300,000 words, Souldancer begged for pruning. There are also many plot, character, and world-building elements in need of continuity patches.

I quickly decided that a cover-to-cover line edit was not in order. Instead I've started rewriting the story from scratch. I only refer back to the prior text for general plot structure and place/character/object names. Along the way I've been able to combine several scenes and delete some subplots and characters altogether.

Right now I'm on chapter twenty-one of the new draft. To give you a sense of perspective, the action occurring in the new chapter twenty-one takes place at about the same time as the events of last version's chapter twenty-five. The chapters are now shorter, so I'm currently at a point near page 200 where the last draft had taken 400 pages to present the same information.

That's the gist of it. I'll be around to field whatever questions any of you have about the new draft.