In our big Music Series read-through, we’ve crossed the midpoint of book two, which pretty much means we’re halfway through the trilogy.

Something we chatted about recently is that there’s a balance we need to strike between getting done reading the damn thing and not missing important points that need discussion. This one hasn’t been edited at all yet, or even shown to any beta readers, so there are things that need work. But we’re not in revisions mode yet. We need to complete the read-through of all three books first.

The whole point of the exercise is to get the entirety of the trilogy into our minds in order to plan our edits holistically. Increasing the interconnection across the books, and strengthening the payoffs in book 3 by laying the right groundwork in books 1 & 2. As we look for ways to tighten up the narrative, we need to keep an eye on scenes in all three books so we don’t orphan anything. The big structural adjustments have to be made first, then we can work on polishing the prose.

A writing partner is someone who helps you stay on track when you’ve got roughly half a million words to wrangle.