Read-Through Completed!

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.