Since Bitstreams of Hope is starting to get more readers, I thought I’d give people an update on where I’m at with book 2. As always, I have to juggle writing with my full-time job, but it’s progressing. I’m doing a lot of things differently to try to speed up the process and make it less effortful.
When writing Bitstreams of Hope, the first draft of the manuscript took only thirty days to write. But I had never written or revised a full-length manuscript before, and the revision process took many months. After that, getting the cover design finished and the files in the correct format for eBook and hardcopy took several more months. I expect just having experience will speed up all of this, but there are other changes I’m making to my process based on the pain points from book 1.
Revisions were painful for a few reasons, and here’s what I’m doing to speed things up this time:
- Revising a book-length document is inherently time-consuming. To fix this, I’m doing much more outlining than last time and reviewing and revising the outline, which is obviously much smaller than a manuscript.
- My book 1 outline turned out to be inadequate in many spots, leaving me to brainstorm material on the spot while drafting the manuscript. To prevent a replay of this, I’m putting much more detail into my outline.
- Now that I’m familiar with the checks I’ll do to make sure the story is good after it’s written, I’m doing some of those checks on the outline before I bother writing the story.
- Last time, I over-researched topics that ended up not being important to the story. To avoid this, I’m trying to do just-in-time research. I only dig into a topic if it’s necessary to progress on the task right in front of me. Some topics need to be well-known before I can complete the outline, but others can wait until right before I write a scene.
- Feedback from beta readers was essential last time, so this time I decided to enlist a collaborator who is giving me feedback at the outline level.
With all of these measures, outlining is taking a lot longer than last time, and it’s making me uncomfortable. I guess we’ll all need to wait and see if it pays off with fewer revisions at the manuscript level. I think it will, and I’m getting excited to actually start writing. I’m in the middle of a two-week writing retreat, and I hope to have an outline I like by the end of it. This will make it easier to maintain momentum for drafting and revising once I go back to work.
I’m sure you’d like to know when the new book will be published, but I’m not experienced enough to tell you that. I would say that the second half of 2025 is the most precise estimate I can give. Even if I can accelerate writing and revising, I still need to give my editor and beta readers time to do their thing. Last time, several beta readers thought a 30-day deadline was asking a lot, so I gave them 4-6 weeks.
You also may be wondering what the content is for book 2. I’m not going to spill that yet, but I can tell you it will be more dynamic and exciting than book 1 and have a larger scope. I’m repeating the structure that worked well to tell book 1’s complex story: a three point-of-view (POV) story with rotating narrators. Gunters already know who two of the characters will be. I’ll also tell you that the title for all books in the series will be Bitstreams of X, where X is a single word.
If you liked Bitstreams of Hope and want the rest of the series to come out as soon as possible, you can make this happen by recommending the book to as many people as possible. If I could quit my day job, I could really crank out this series and the ideas I have for what comes after.