1/3 done, and a hand-drawn cover!

We’re now 90 manuscript pages into draft two. We’ve done a huge voice and character pass after our restructuring, and we now have strong voices for three of the four PoV characters. We’re currently trying to find the voice for our young male scholar (the only male PoV in this book, it turns out).

This is about 1/3 of the way through the book. We’ve added a lot as we’ve gone through (10k extra words since the restructure, so we’re back over 80k). The book will probably end up around 90k words once done.

We are feeling very good about the restructure and the voicing – it’s also helped with the prose, because we can now get a good sense of how the characters think and feel. And now the start is a lot better paced; we felt the old chapters 1 and 2 dragged too much.

I have also hand-drawn a cover, which I really love. The hands need a bit of work (turns out I’m not so different from AI after all, but at least they don’t have six fingers), but otherwise I really like the vibe.

We’ve gone a little slower than usual this week, as we’ve been outlining a Christmas romance novella. It’s a far cry from the bleak eco-horror of the Witchwood, but we’re hoping it will improve our romance writing in the process. We’ll keep you updated as to what’s going on with publishing etc. We’re not actively querying: we did query a few agents with our (admittedly shitty) first draft but got nothing back, and we will continue that process once we’ve finished this draft. We may self-publish the novella, but right now it’s little more than a twinkle in our eye and a few hilariously awkward scenes that we’ve written.

As usual, you can contact us via the form for any questions, or to sign up to beta read. You can also find us on TikTok and Instagram.