I’m Kristen Tate—editor, writer, and proprietor of the Blue Garret. I’m currently chronicling the process of revising and self-publishing my next book in these subscriber-only newsletters. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of this email. Thanks for joining me at the garret!

It is week thirty of 2024. How’s the writing going for you these days? It’s the middle of summer here in the northern hemisphere, a time that is supposed to be slow and lazy, we are told—full of beach days and ice cream and hours in a hammock somewhere with a breeze. If that’s the week you are having, enjoy it to the full! Rest your fill and dream some hazy dreams. But if that kind of week isn’t available or desirable for you, create your own template for a writing week that works for you.

Here at the garrett, I’ve been working quite hard but finding, to my delight, that the harder I work, the more energy I have. I do have a (non-beach) vacation coming up in a couple weeks, so I know I’m not at risk of pushing myself all the way into burnout, and I’ve given myself permission to go at full throttle in the meantime. After a week or so mostly devoted to my own book, I’ve been able to turn a lot of that energy to editing work, diving into an absorbing family saga and giving final polishes to a couple other manuscripts.

Coming back to Novel Study, I’m thrilled to report that the manuscript is finally DONE! Let’s look at my stats:

July 20 snapshot

⏱️ 155 hours to date

☑️ 133 to-do list items

✅ 66 to-do items completed

📑 Draft #6: 0/261 pages

Previous installments: Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 7, Week 8, Week 10, Week 12, Week 14, Week 22, Week 26, Week 28

I’ll be honest: I completely underestimated how much time I would need to write four new chapters and revise the whole manuscript. Getting the illustrations up to scratch also took far more time than I thought. If I’d realized in December that I had 155 hours of work in front of me, I would never have thought a spring pub date was possible. But that’s okay—it’s all a learning process, and you’re here learning right alongside me.

One of my big tasks last weekend was to revise a chapter on the structure of The Secret Hours by Mick Herron. These big-picture structural analyses (like this on on time jumps in Black Sun) have often taken me many hours to finish, even in blog post form. But The Secret Hours is especially complex and it turned out that my first draft of the chapter was, essentially, me talking my way through how the book worked—discovery writing in its purest sense. But I did discover my argument along the way! In my revision, I needed to start from that argument and bring readers along on a tour of what I’d found.

When I used Word’s Compare Documents tool to see my revision on the chapter, here’s what I found:

Words I didn’t change are in black; new words are in blue, and everything in the margin is material I deleted. This is sometimes what a complete revision looks like, and that’s fine! I needed to write every one of those deleted words in order to be able to write the new words.

Now that I’ve finished my writing checklist for the book, I’m moving into the editing and production checklists. Draft 6 will be my copyedit and final polish, and I’ll be working on that while I get the cover designed and the illustrations vetted. My hope is to have the copyedit complete and the design work in process by the time I leave on vacation in two weeks. I’ll be back then to tell you how I do! No lazy beach days or fruity cocktails for me in the coming days—just piles and piles of words, both mine and others, to swim around in. I can’t wait.

Our Thing of Joy this week features someone who is for sure doing things exactly his own way, cycling through Europe with his cat. Enjoy this compilation of every time the cat hisses at a passing dog.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

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