FDAD: A Multi-World Fantasy WIP Update #4 Finished!

I’ve finally had the satisfaction of writing the words “End of Book One.” July 13th, 11:30pm.

It’s not the first time I’ve ever finished a draft, but it’s the first for a book of this length and it’s truly a completed draft–no boilerplate text for skipped sections.

Once I made it to the penultimate battle, the rest of the book flowed pretty well. You can see I clocked in a few days of high word counts.

I’d had the ending figured out for quite some time, so it was nice to finally get to that part and find that the major aspects of it didn’t need to change.

Some highlights since the last update:

• One of my side characters offed a bad guy and I’m pretty proud of this line: “And like a master violinist playing the final note of a concerto, Shell slit his throat.”
• During the final battle, my main antagonist delivered a “You can do it. I believe in you” line to her comrade but with her clearly angsty edge.
• On the last page, my main character is just at the very beginning of accepting that she has to face and deal with her trauma or it’ll keep getting in the way of her gaining and regaining better control of her powers. She’ll be doing much more reflective, internal work in book 2.

Book 2 is mostly set in a world with clothing magic, a history of magical girls, and a big train. My gut is telling me it’s gonna be a heist since the characters have to recover an object the MC absolutely needs that went missing after a (mostly) natural event destroyed its hiding place.

But my next WIP will be a contemporary that’s much shorter than this book. Technically, it’ll be my second draft of the story, but I changed the entire setup so it’ll basically be a first draft again. The story takes place at a college during Holy Week and is in many ways an allegory of the gospels, but not quite (and also very queer).

My plan right now is to begin drafting that book, then incorporate some days of editing FDAD Book 1. These books are different enough to where I’m not concerned about getting exhausted or ideas from one bleeding into the other. My goal is to get FDAD Book 1 polished enough to query, which will only happen after this editing round, a beta reader round, and another self-editing round at the very least. In other words, I really don’t plan on starting book 2 unless/until I sell book 1. I’ll probably summarize book 2 in broad terms and do some planning, but no drafting.

That’s it for this update. Next time, I’ll say a little bit more about my new WIP.

Cheers!