Before you know it, a month storms by and we are racing into the Christmas period. And I haven't posted.

This week I completed a hard copy first edit of Chasse's Song. The process of working through the current 93,000 words was spread over a three week period. I begin by saying it is an exciting and scary experience to read a novel draft in its entirety for the first time.

Among the aspects I scrutinized were:

• story continuity
• character consistency
• character growth
• fact consistency
• time and seasonal logic
• travel logic
• geographical logic and continuity

and to see if there really is an enjoyable story in place (I'm pleased to say I think there is!).

The editing process in Chasse's Song sent me several times back to Tamesan's Song (Book One) to check consistencies in culture and characters. While it is tempting to take licence and adjust aspects of the original story, I've disciplined myself to make sure the second book follows the original in matters, for example, such as the ages of Chasse, Tamesan and Jaysin.

Facts and consistency aside, the edit also involved checking for effective descriptive passages and images. Where appropriate, I added colour, names, details, weather, light, sound, odours and texture to immerse the reader deeper into moments and character experiences.

I also checked, edited and added opportunities for Chasse to be reflective and thoughtful - in other words not just an action and dialogue character. Because he is a young warrior startled by the violence of his role in the Harbin community, Chasse faces the effects of trauma - basically PTSD - in the form of nightmares and personal uncertainty. I have been working through to make this side of his character, and his learning/growth, believable.

Establishing dragon and wizard culture in a side story to Chasse's main story also influenced sections of editing to ensure the 'lore' established in book one is visualised and developed in book two.

Reading silently and aloud is a crucial action in the editing process. I use it to test expression, fluency and dialogue feasibility and consequently rewrote a significant number of sentences and phrases to improve the reader's experience. Searching for clumsy expression, awkward expression, archaic expression, stumbling expression is probably the most challenging and in some ways neverending editing task. This also touches on sentence openings - juxtaposition of phrases to add variance to the rhythm of the writing.

Reading dialogue aloud is a crucial part of the editing process to ensure the characters' interchanges are character-consistent but also flow as in natural dialogue. Where the dialogue sounds/felt stilted, I've made changes.

The edit also explores the storytelling flow - how actions and events integrate and how and where to 'break' them in order to arrive at the next part of the story. This is particularly important in constructing the chapters. My aim is always to make a chapter a 'little story' in itself that is connected by character and the larger tale to preceding and subsequent chapters. This also involves looking for how and where seeds/connectors/hooks can be inserted to keep the reader wanting to know what happens next.

And there is the obvious editing for typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors - the mechanical, secretarial editing that ensures the reader's attention isn't derailed by an obvious language blunder. Sadly, as careful as I try to be from the outset, there are always quite a few to fix.

With the hard edit finished, from tomorrow I begin to transfer those into the original digital manuscript. This process becomes the second edit because it involves the second full reading of the manuscript. Experience tells me that I will make additional changes as I work the first edit fixes into the text.

On a different note, today I started the third book, Jaysin's Song - okay just the first two hundred words, but I have the concept emerging so the next few weeks will be an interesting challenge with Christmas bearing down. I am hoping to get at least one more blog entry done before Dec 25th. Let's see.

Time to sketch some new spaces and places for the development of Chasse's Song. The second instalment of The Last Wizard is close to 65,000 words this week, but the action moves away from Harbin and into a much larger world. Tam, Chasse, Jaysin and the fledgling dragon, Harmi, have escaped the clutches of Marron and the new Dragon Head Mikane, and must forge a new path into a world where wizards and dragons are far from welcome.

I began by enlarging the original Harbin map beyond Dragon Mountain, exploring how the greater mountain range might look, where rivers would run, where people are likely to have settled and where the wilds were still 'untouched' by civilisation. The new land also has a couple of stark reminders of the past - a large forest where dragons were once meant to have lived and a vast scar across a forest/plain where dragon fire burned everything and where nothing grows.

Choosing a map 'style' to represent mapping by the greater civilisation beyond Harbin is a challenge. Whether to represent mountains as peaks or as semi-cartographical pictures, and to what degree to include detail that will eventually be lost in a small picture in a paperback all are questions to explore. Also generating a sense of the city to which the characters are heading eventually is a task I've started. My first drafts are included in this blog to show the thinking behind creating a physical fantasy world. Coupled with this will be the development of the wider world's social, political and economic cultures.

The writing process is fascinating, even when it is something you feel confident and motivated with. Chasse's Song has progressed to 62,000 words - slow by my personal standards, but not indicative of the ideas: more about available time.

Not a lot to write this week as far as process goes. I'm still drafting maps for the location, and Kirsi has shared a second draft of the first cover illustration that effectively captures a sense of character, place and colour, so aspects are happening. Events are shifting the main characters out of the village into a world beyond the mountain, and that is where the story goes forward from today.

On a different tangent, I can no longer order author copies of my books on Amazon - an issue that other writers have warned me of - so I will spend a little time in the coming fortnight learning how to prepare and publish print-on-demand copies of my work on IngramSpark. This will enable me to order copies that I can on-sell to people. While Amazon proved easy and convenient to make my out-of-print work available as ebooks, it has backfired as far as accessing paper versions. I will correct that.

​This time - not much else to say...

Back at work means less time for the good things, so I've left this entry for a fortnight.

The first exciting news was seeing a working draft of Kirsi's illustration for the first book. We're working on the ambient colour being similar to the original novel ie colours around Tamesan's name meaning the Dawn's Light while capturing a sense of character and place. I'm loving what I've seen and we are discussing important features to add connection between the art and the writing.

Readers often ask if the writer has input into cover illustrations. My experience generally has been yes, and is certainly the case now when self-publishing, but also some of my earlier books emerged with covers approved by the publisher and not entirely by me. I think a lot depends on the marketing editors and what they guess will work as attractive covers.

Chasse's Song is now entering Chapter 18, and just over 55,000 words. The last two chapters brought interesting challenges where I am trying to capture Chasse's struggle with what constitutes being a man - traditionally in his village and what people expect of him. The antagonists have been reintroduced to ramp up the pressure on Chasse as they threaten the people he loves. Chasse is an emerging warrior, but his inexperience and lack of confidence arising from his inexperience combine to frustrate him when he wants to act as he believes he should act.

Because of the central character focus, it's also interesting working out how to show growth continuing offstage for Tam and Jaysin who are coming to grips with learning magic and living with a growing dragon. The trope/feature of magic in The Last Wizard books is partly the immutable and ubiquitous connection between dragons and wizards, with dragons being an inter-generational source of magical lore and ability, and also the presumption of the capacity for magic to enhance and work on the natural energy in all matter. Tam's growing capacity for magic is tied directly to her baby and growing dragon. Jaysin, however, is an anomaly; a person who can weave magic from the very matter of things, something not seen in this particular fantasy world before.
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Speaking of fantasy worlds, as each of my works emerged I placed them geographically on the same planet/world. The Andrakis trilogy with its lands of Andrakis, Ranu Ka Shehaala, Targa and Uz Erhaag expanded eastward in the Ashuak Chronicles to include Ashua, Shekisu and Sekesu and Ukesu, and in the Dreaming in Amber series the world not only encompassed all of these lands but introduced Western Shess. Map examples below...