One of the first questions people ask when they find out I write sci-fi novels is “How long did it take?” For my first novel, it was almost four years from the time I first wrote down the premise to when I published it. My novella took much less, of course, and I expect my sequel novel to be completed in less than a year. Read on if you want to see what took all that time.
For Star Riders, I had thought for a long time about writing a novel about highly-advanced aliens providing an opportunity for races like ours to hitch rides to the stars. But it wasn’t until July 2014 that I decided to do something about it and enrolled in a local class on novel writing, in which I developed a premise and some characters. I wrote a few chapters, but didn’t get much further and wandered off for a while. A long while.
About two years later, in July of 2016, I got back to it, and bought Scrivener, a fantastic writing tool (I keep saying I’m going to do a blog post on it, but haven’t yet), and installed it on my Mac. I wrote sporadically for the rest of that year, but got serious about it in January of 2017. At that point, I had about 14,000 words (not including what I’d written in 2014, which I abandoned to start over). I started keeping track in a daily log, and finally completed the first draft ten months later.
As you can see from the progress chart, I had several periods where I slacked off and made little progress, particularly about 75% through. I mostly wrote in the morning, getting up early to write for an hour or so before going to work. Ten months later, in October 2017, the first draft was done!
I took a month off, and did the first rewrite in December and January, 2018. then sent it off to a small group of volunteer Beta readers for a month. Then I spent a month incorporating changes due to their feed back, and sent it off to a professional editor who worked on it in May 2018. The rewrite took another month, then it was off to a proofreader for two weeks, and finally it was ready to publish on Amazon at the end of June 2018.
Here’s a summary:
- First draft: 10 months
- Rewrite: 2 months
- Beta Review: 1 month
- Rewrite: 1 month
- Editor: 1 month
- Rewrite: 1 month
- Proofread: 2 weeks
- Formatting: 1 week
All told, that was 17 months.
So how about the sequel, The Rogue of Sevado? Well, I just finished the first draft, after 5 months, so that’s cut the time in half from the first book. I was definitely more disciplined this time, and NaNoWriMo gave me a good boost (half the total words in one month).
You can see the steep upward slope in the middle, where I was keeping up with a 1,667 word/day pace for NaNoWriMo. Interestingly, there’s a period after that where progress slowed considerably, much like the 75% point with Star Riders.
Looking forward, I’m planning on doing the Beta Review and the editor in parallel, to save more time. Here’s the plan:
- First Draft: 5 months (done)
- Rewrite: 2 months
- Editor and Beta Review: 1 month
- Final Rewrite: 1 month
- Proofread: 2 weeks
- Formatting: 1 week
So that’s a total of 10 months, which should see the book published in July of this year.
OK, so if I’m going to get there, I should stop here and get back to writing!
