Book 2 is coming along, though the expected publication date continues to slip. I’m doing better at managing the human capacity issues I wrote about in August, but writing a novel is still inherently a lot of unpredictable work. And now that I’m getting closer to the end of the process, I have a lot of dependencies on other people and can’t do much to speed things up. As always, quality is the priority over publication date. This leads to decisions like continuing to use a human copy editor even though AI can do a reasonable job now. Humans are still better.
I just finished digesting the feedback I got from my two alpha readers. The response was pretty positive, but I still have quite a few story-level changes to make. After that, scene- and page-level revisions should be relatively quick. My goal is to be ready for beta reading by mid-December at the latest so that reading can occur in parallel with two weeks of travel I have planned for late December. I have a day-job conference in Japan followed by nine days in a country near there that I’ve never visited and is a candidate for a book 3 setting.
I worked on the cover and bonus material while alpha reading was happening, so I feel pretty good about the overall project. More on these materials later.
If all goes well (ha ha), the road to publication has the following milestones.
| Date | Other people | Me |
| Now – mid-December | N/A | Finish beta draft |
| December – January | Beta reading | Travel & bonus material |
| February | N/A | Post-beta revisions |
| March | Copy editing | Finish bonus material |
| April | N/A | Formatting and publication |
By that timeline, release of Kindle and paperback editions will probably happen in early May. Much later than I had hoped, about two and a half years after book 1 was published.
I definitely need to cut myself some slack. Publishing a novel is hard under the best circumstances, and I have a relatively intense day job. Luckily, I do have flexibility in my hours and a lot of vacation time, so I’m better off than many working people. I’m also privileged to be earning enough to be able to hire multiple editors.
My sense of urgency is mostly self-imposed, though I do feel like reality is constantly threatening to outstrip my fiction. It’s not like I have legions of fans impatient for book 2. Maybe after there’s evidence that this really will be a series of high quality books, the fans will come. I learned a lot about promotion with book 1, and plan a major push once book 2 is in the can.
