My August in writing, wherein I face rewriting an arguably broken draft.

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-08-31-august-in-writing/

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It's a good sign when I tear up while planning a side character's arc.

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Quick July in Writing blog post, where I received my developmental edit and continued planning my draft 6.

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-08-01-july-in-writing/

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Based on beta reader feedback, I've started to completely refactor my 1st POV outline again. But I'm close!

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-06-30-june-in-writing/

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I can adjust the various numbers in the dictionaries if the output looks off.

I probably could have done this with a gantt chart or Excel or similar, but this was my comfort zone.

I was *seriously* dragging my feet on generating a timeline of events. Finally realized I didn't want to do it the manual, error-prone way.

I wrote a helper script that takes two dictionaries: characters and their ages at a certain date, and events and their relative years from that date. The script outputs a markdown table with everyone's ages at the time of each event, so I can verify things look right. #tooling

I blogged about finishing my #FifthDraft, submitting the manuscript for a #DevelopmentalEdit, and fleshing out future books in the series.

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-05-31-may-in-writing/

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Heads up, self-pub authors here as well: Amazon is lowering the royalty rates of paperbacks and hardcovers next month. You'll also have to check your books so that the royalty doesn't drop to 0. Price hikes ahead.

The link is to a Bluesky post where the impact of the change is explained by one author.
https://bsky.app/profile/sharkiatwrites.bsky.social/post/3lp4uldp25s2h

#authors #selfpublishing

@bhearsum Thank you! I'm definitely excited.

I blogged about my April in Writing, in which I found a #DevelopmentalEditor to send my manuscript out to :)

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-04-30-april-in-writing/

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@alan I was completely unaware that it worked the other way. This will likely help me keep my manuscript in sync once I start getting comments in the Word doc - I can diff changes in the exported markdown and make sure they match my original markdown changes.

https://github.com/prosegrinder/pandoc-templates is a godsend, doing all the heavy lifting converting markdown chapters into editor submission-format docx.

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From inside
A dream
Waking is
Like dying.

#poetry

After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so fucking stupid.

I blogged about my fourth draft progress, tooling, and developmental editing.

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-03-31-march-in-writing/

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I was severely sleep deprived yesterday, so I worked on one of my websites and started converting my ad-hoc scripts into a real python tool.

(Reinforces my belief that I need less focus and headspace to work on tech than creativity.)

Handwritten notes on pdfs take a lot of disk. I had to split my wip into chunks to avoid Github's 100mb limit.

I blogged about my February in Writing, where I:

- finished my third draft,
- began reading the book in chapter order for the first time, and
- did a lot of research on developmental editing services.

https://escapewindow.com/blog/2025-02-28-february-in-writing/

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#AmEditing
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Pushed hard to finish the initial 3rd draft pass yesterday, and today I'm drained. I think I'll work on technical things today: document conversion and formatting, website work.

Finished the initial rough 3rd draft pass of the 2nd POV. 18 more scenes to go.
I want to fix a number of issues and polish before I declare the 3rd draft done, but if I hit a scene per day, I'll have all of March for that.

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#AmEditing
#WritingCommunity