I Wrote a Book! Hidden Queen Update
Hello! Today is a good day. Yesterday I wrote those delicious words, “The End” on the first prose draft of The Hidden Queen, book 2 of the Nightfall Saga, AKA Demon Cycle book 7. Publishers hate “The End” so it will be swiftly be excised from the manuscript, but I write them for me.
The Hidden Queen was challenging logistically (the world was on fire!) as well as creatively, where the story was morphing away from my neat character arcs and into something deeper.
In The Desert Prince, Olive was lead singer and Darin was mostly on tambourine. I had planned for The Hidden Queen to be the reverse, but Darin doesn’t like the spotlight, and Olive isn’t one to play rhythm.
But sometimes life puts you in the spotlight whether you like it or not. Darin carries a heavy burden in The Hidden Queen, but don’t let his sensitivity fool you. The common thread of heroes isn’t strength, courage, or purity of motive. Heroes are stubborn, and there ent many in the world as stubborn as Darin Bales.
Anyway, today is the day I wax introspective and do postmortem on the spreadsheet numbers and lifecycle of the project. Read along if you’re into that sort of thing.
I first created a bespoke file for the book that would become The Hidden Queen on November 13, 2019. I think it was called Olive_2_Stepsheet.docx or something clever like that. Said file contained 1,245 words of notes.
I was giving 99% of my attention to The Desert Prince at the time, but ideas for upcoming books always spill over, and occasionally I would dump notes and ideas into that file. I didn’t really begin work on The Hidden Queen in earnest until March 1, 2021, after all the brush fires and promotion for The Desert Prince quieted down, and the newly vaccinated world began to open back up.
The bulk of the writing, including outlining, took place over 79 weeks of work, wherein I wrote an average of 3,541 words a week. Not the 5K average I strive for, but gimme a break. There was pandemic and war and I have a kindergartener and a teenager at home. I had some amazing weeks and some so-so weeks, but overall I work best at a solid steady pace.
At some point the Stepsheet was split off into two files, one with a chronological bulleted outline of every chapter in the book in my personal shorthand, and one with the more digestible prose my readers have come to expect. I maintain both files over the course of writing a book, keeping all my notes in the stepsheet until it’s time to turn them into prose one chronological chapter at a time. No skipping ahead in the prose file! Everything must follow what has gone before.
I used to create bespoke files for each chapter, copy/pasting the bulleted outline for that chapter into a new file, converting it to prose. By this I mean fixing grammar, adding literary flourish, expanding on unexplored ideas, bringing emotional resonance to cold plot points, etc. If the bullets are the easy part of writing, the prose is the hard part. When the conversion was complete, I would copy/paste it again into a growing file of finished chapters.
I did it this way because since the beginning of my career, mobile writing was a real boon to my productivity, but it came at a cost. It allowed me to write The Warded Man on the F train from Brooklyn to Times Square, but the technology of 2006—when I was on an HP Ipaq phone synching Word files with the Docs to Go app—couldn’t handle more than a chapter or two at a time without glitching and losing a day’s writing (or worse), so to be safe I could only work on tiny files.
Things gradually improved over the years as Microsoft got on the stick and mobile devices grew more powerful. I juggle the bulk of my writing between desktop and an ipad pro now, rather than my phone. But even as recently as The Desert Prince, when the document got long at the end, there were file corruption scares that discouraged me from trusting mobile devices completely.
The Hidden Queen is the first book where I have worked in the main file for the entirety of the prose writing, all the way to the end, without a problem, volleying the file from desktop to ipad to iphone and back without a hiccup.
And that’s impressive! The first draft, completed January 4, 2023, is 200,927 words. Short for a Peter V. Brett book, but impressive for a mobile device!
That said, I took no chances, creating 52 dated backup files over the life of the project, saved both locally and on the cloud. If something had gone wrong, the losses would not have been devastating.
Do you make backup files? No? Well, you should. Some rules of writing are pretty subjective, but making sure you can’t lose all your work isn’t one of them. It’s easy, too! Every once in a while when you are about the close the file, just click “save a copy as” and add the date to the filename. I hope you never need to open one, but if you do, you will be glad to have them.
The next phase is editing, which is done in MSWord Track Change mode. Tracking changes makes the document hold and organize massive amounts of metadata in the form of inserted comments, line edits, rewrites, and notes, tracking who made each and when. Traditionally, I am chained to my desktop during this phase, and even then I get the spinning color wheel and a brief panic attack when the load is heaviest at the end.
I am not sure The Hidden Queen will be the book where that changes to allow mobile freedom, but I may dip a cautious toe in the water.
By this point some of you may be asking, “All the obsessive numbers are great, but when does the book actually come out?”
Good question! The short answer is “I don’t know”. The publishers will determine the exact date, but that is TBD.
The long answer is there will be months still of editing, then production, then a place on an ever-lengthening print queue as paper and print supply chain problems increase lead time on books. Back when things were rosy it was usually 9-10 months from first draft to store shelves. These days, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the worldwide English language release of The Hidden Queen in early 2024.
On the international side, this extra lead time may prove a boon, giving translators a head start that allows native language publications closer to the worldwide English release.
Regardless, once we have a solid pub date I will shout it from the rooftops.
If you made it this far, congratulations on your attention span! Social media has not broken you. And thank you, with all my heart, for helping me make a career doing something I love so much (even if it makes me crazy sometimes). You are my true friends.
-Peter
January 5, 2023
