How’s it going crazy people?

Firstly, I want to say I’m sorry for not posting anything on the blog in a while. As some of you know, I have recently left my work at Starbreeze – the company where I’ve worked for the last two years. These last couple of months have been really hard. I’m not gonna lie and say otherwise. I’m also not gonna go into detail of what exactly happened. The only thing that matters is that it’s over and I’m happy. I learnt a lot about myself in the process and in the end justice prevailed.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

I have a solid financial situation so I’m not in desperate need to find a new workplace. What I will do is to focus on my novel and treat it just as I have before – like a real profession, but this time I will work as many hours as I possibly can on it, instead of the 2,5 hours I was limited to on weekdays. In the meantime I will see what jobs are available in the gaming industry, but with the caveat that I’ll be looking for projects where the creativity comes first, not the politics. I’m not gonna waste any time working on something just for money (that might be selfish, but you know what? YOLO).

So what’s the status of my novel?

I’m deep in editing-mode. I have discovered that I enjoy doing a really thorough editing pass; which means going line-by-line. I scribbled down hundreds of notes of stuff I wanted to change while I wrote the 1st draft. That will be taken care of now. This method is slower than others, that’s for sure, but in the end I will have a MUCH better 2nd draft.

I have mentioned before that I’ve worked as a project manager, and I use the same mindset when working on the book. The way I completed the 1st draft was by giving myself deadlines and minimum word count I needed to achieve every day. I also had a 10K word document where I had outlined the whole story (a synopsis for each chapter).

So here’s the plan for the coming months:

1. I will spend the rest of August and September to finish the 2nd draft. I can easily accomplish this if I sit my ass down and work 8 hours a day.
2. When the 2nd draft is done I will send it out to my lovely beta-readers (seriously, thank you guys in advance). I will give them around one month to read the script and send me their feedback.
3. With the collected feedback from the beta-readers, I will then start working on the 3rd draft and make the necessary changes needed.
4. The 3rd draft will then be sent to my editor Tim Marquitz ((www.http://dominioneditorial.com) over in the states  who will basically rip me a new asshole and tell me everything about the book sucks. He will give the script a complete edit (language & grammar, story, pacing etc) and help me make it the best book it can be.
5. Based on Tim’s feedback, I will then work on putting together a 4th draft. That might be a bit back and forth, but the goal is to have a version that is ready for submission (I’ll talk more about this another time) by the end of the year.
6. Time to hunt me one of those legendary Poke… Agents that everyone is talking about. If you want to be traditionally published you’ll need an agent, so that comes next.

Phew. That’s a lot of steps, right? Did anyone think it’s easy to write a book? You’d think writing the thing would be the hard part, but nope, now the real works begin. Well, challenge accepted.

End note: I’ll make sure to update the blog on a more regular basis and talk about whatever random shit I feel like. That will most likely be books, video games, movies and so on. And of course, I will be updating you all on how the novel is coming along. If anyone has any questions just hit me up below in the comment section or use Twitter or Facebook.