So, for people who don’t stalk you on the Twitter, how about you tell us how far you are right now in the revision process.
My progress bar is not updated because I’m lazy—I need to tell Peter to update that when I post. I’m 50% through—maybe more like 55% of the way through the final revision of the last book. So, the final revision, here’s how the process goes for those who are curious: I turned in the book like January 1st. At that point, that was first draft. Usually, I don’t do revisions from editorial revisions on the first draft. I actually go through it a second time and do a second draft, and that’s what I turn in. If I can get the time, I turn in a third draft. This time I turned in a second draft, so I did first draft and I said, “Okay, wait two weeks and let me get ahead of you in the second draft,” and I was just sending them chunks as I finished the second draft. There’s not time on this book to do the whole thing straight through and then send it, and things, and so they then start sending back things, and I start the third draft immediately, and we keep doing that until we get to this one which is seventh draft, I think is where we are right now—somewhere in there—like I’ve been, some of them I would do two drafts while I was waiting for things back on theirs.
Anyway, and they just kept feeding me sixth draft sort of stuff that [had] been sitting on my computer, and they finally got the last of that to me last week which means that Maria and Alan and Harriet are all done, and it’s all on me just to finish the last tweaks that they’ve requested in the book, and that’s what this draft is, is the last tweaks. Things that they say, “Hey, we need this little thing fixed; we need to add this thing to this scene,” or all that little stuff. Nothing major is happening in this one. I did add one new scene in this draft that I felt we needed but it’s kind of a short one—it’s only like five pages—um, but yeah, so that’s where we are. My hope is, and goal is, to be able to turn it in next week some time. I dunno how viable that is. I’m probably way past 55% as I think about it, because I’ve been working each night. I was at 50% on like Wednesday, so I’m probably around the two-thirds mark, or something, right now, and then that will be it; it’ll go to copy-edit and proofreads, all of which are handled by Team Jordan, of which I don’t do anything unless they come up with a major continuity error or something like that. Somewhere in there, it will hopefully go to our lovely beta readers to make sure that I didn’t put people in two places, so…that Sulin doesn’t end up in two places at once. They missed that one though, so you can blame all of us on that one.
I was like, “Whoa, a Wheel of Time book, I’m gonna just read this; I can’t talk to anybody about it.”
Yeah. So, anyway, it’ll go to copyedit and proofreads, and hopefully some beta reads for three months or so, and then it’ll go to the printers, and that takes about…it’s about a three month process, and they’ll ship ‘em here, and we ship ‘em out to bookstores, and then that’s when it comes out.
The Sulin error was in The Gathering Storm , which had fewer beta readers than Towers of Midnight (Jenn was one of them), but the latter was on a tighter schedule which led to more typos, etc.
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