City of Mages Revision Progress

With To the Gap out, I'm hard at work now on getting City of Mages revised and edited and ready for release. It's funny, with each of my books (not just in Daughter of the Wildings, but all my books), as I start a revision I'm going, Yay, this book is one of my favorites!, and towards the end I'm thinking, Augh, I just want to get this book done and get on to the next one, it's one of my favorites. But really, all my books are my favorites, there's just different things I like about each one. City of Mages is fun because we finally get to see Granadaia, and because it focuses in so closely on Lainie. (Some quotes from Lainie from book 5, though the last one is actually from book 6.) I do have to say that of all the amazing covers for the series, this is one of my favorites.

Preparing the revision was pretty fast and easy (see this post for my revision process). The hardest part was trying to figure out, for the scene cards, if something was one mega-scene or should be divided into two smaller scenes. Last Thursday, I started the actual marking up with the red pen. This version of City of Mages is starting out at 44,000 words; I expect the final published version to come in somewhere around 60,000 words. I tend to "write short" and then I go back and layer in descriptions, fill out bits of action I'd only summarized, stuff like that. So far I've already added almost 1000 words.

Like with books 2-4, I'm starting out thinking this one won't need as much work as the others, and then that turns out to be wrong. To the Gap especially took me by surprise how hard it was. On the surface, the storyline is pretty simple, but there was a lot going on beneath the surface, the progression of Silas and Lainie's feelings and motivations and how they were thinking about things, that needed a lot of pacing and fine-tuning. On the other hand, the plot of City of Mages seems more complex, and there are some things going on beneath the surface that have been a little tricky to work out (who knows what when and how they know it and what they think about it, that kind of thing), but the emotional and motivational character arc is pretty simple.

I still can't really say when City of Mages is going to be out. We're taking our younger son back to school at the end of this month, meaning a road trip of a couple of days, and in mid-October we'll probably be hosting a wedding reception for our older son and his wife (they have a bunch of other stuff to take care of first, and late-September/October is the best time of year for having outdoor events here), plus in addition to the time there's always the fatigue factor that I have to consider. I'd like to say late October, though it could go sooner or later, into November. In the meantime, I'll be working hard to get it out as soon as possible without short-changing the quality.

Back to work :-)

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