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Writer's pictureRichard Swan

Empire of the Wolf: Progress Update 07/04

The Justice of Kings


The INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING novel continues to be out there and available for purchase. Hardbacks for the lucky territories, big floppy trade paperbacks for Australia and New Zealand for some reason.


Empire of the Wolf 2


I turned in my edits today! For the nerds interesting in timings, I handed in the first draft of this on 14 January (2022, obviously), editorial comments came back on 26 February, and I completed those today, being 7 April. So the edits on my end took about 6 weeks.


So what did I do in those 6 weeks? A lot of fleshing out, mainly. The early draft, especially the first 1/3, was a bit too speedy. The manuscript is now 20k words heavier, for a total of just over 170k. I also did some more character work, dialling a few back, beefing a few up, and made the ending... just... MORE (that was literally what my editors said to do. "It's fine, just do MORE.") So it's more. And sadder.


Book 2 is due for copyedits no later than 16 May, so barring any catastrophes this should be well in-hand. It's also gone off to the cover artist, which is definitely the best and most exciting part of the process.


Empire of the Wolf 3


This has obviously been utterly neglected whilst I've been editing book 2, so it's still sitting at about 35k words. I'll need to change a few bits, too, to make sure it's in line with book 2. I'll pick this up again probably next week. I'm hoping that the first draft will be done in about 5 months.


Empire of the Wolf Short Story


I was recently invited by a well-known SFF publication to write an EOTW short story. This was great fun to write, just over 4k words, a self-contained dark tale about Vonvalt and Bressinger set 10 years before the events of The Justice of Kings. Don't know what, if anything, will happen with this, as I'm yet to hear back from the editor, but if it's successful I will definitely do more short stories / novellas in the coming months and years.


That's it for now!


Rich

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