After completing the read-through on the freshly completed first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we jumped right in on edits. The first step was to go through it together and deal with all the easiest issues. These were mostly things like missing “the”s and other typos that were discovered during the read-through. After that, Jen started at the top of the comments list and Kent started at the bottom, and we hunted down other low-hanging fruit. Now that we’ve had several work sessions devoted to this, the lower branches have been plucked clean and we’re tackling slightly thornier stuff.

Not that any of it counts as “thorny.” We haven’t found anything that throws the whole plot into question or makes us wish our vocation was something easier like yacht-racing. But there are minor continuity things that are spread throughout the manuscript, for example. And there are minor continuity things that only affect a few places, but we need to establish how the story physics do actually work before we can settle on the preferred version and get everything aligned to it. Some of it will take a little discussion, but even the biggest issues that we marked aren’t all that large.

Meanwhile, Jen has also been sneaking in some sessions while Kent day-jobs (can we call it moonlighting if she does it while the sun is out?), and she just completed the 20-page prose outline for Book 2! Then she made Kent read the whole thing aloud in one sitting, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.

A writing partner is someone to divvy up the chores list with.

Last night we finished our first read-through of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1!

Rather than popping the champagne again some more, we devoted the rest of the evening to planning our next moves. There is still a huge amount of work to do on this series. It’s a bit of a learning process because this is the first time we knew going in that we were writing a series. First time we admitted it to ourselves, anyway.

We discussed the possibility of moving on to Ghost Novel #2 right now, leaving the revisions of this manuscript until later. Maybe even getting first drafts done of all four books before circling back, so that we’re not devoting energy to polishing something that might end up changing anyway due to developments in the later books. Of course, by the time we returned to them, our notes about Novel #1 might no longer make any sense to us.

We also discussed the possibility of diving right back in on Novel #1, while it’s fresh, and addressing all those notes we keep complaining about. The worry there is we could be getting farther off-course relative to our original ideas for later books.

What we decided on is a middle path. We will review all our rainbows and partially written synopses and other notes for books 2-4, update those notes based on what we learned while writing book 1, and then tackle the book 1 revisions before we turn our focus to actually writing prose for the next manuscript. That strikes a nice balance of reminding ourselves about series-spanning story features without letting the read-through we just did get too stale.

A writing partner is someone who’d let you drink champagne if you really wanted it.