I'm not sure how many people still follow me here, but whatever. After a long silence on this account, it is finally time for an update. If you don’t want to read all the rambling, you can skip to the last paragraph, haha.

Precisely one year ago, I started writing the second draft. I picked up the work I had left unfinished after completing the first draft approximately two and a half years ago. At that time I could not have anticipated the amount of work and effort it would take to come to this point. You may remember that I initially expected to publish in the spring of this year. And later pushed that target off to summer. But now, after one year of work, I reached the end of this second draft of the book. Man, what a year it has been. I don’t think my schedule ever got so cramped as this one. Days passed, weeks were over, months flew by, and time started to overtake me. Aside from the writing, my own life has seen some incredible changes too. Some of them were righteously fantastic, while others left me devastated.

Where my creative drive was still full of energy and dedication last year, it has slowly gotten more depleted the longer I worked on this draft. I can see the results of that in the feedback you guys have given me, and in my own performance too. I would not say that I have a writing block, but rather think that I have reached the limits of my current capabilities. The book sits currently at over 116K words, which is, frankly, just astonishing to realize. But that does bring its drawbacks with it. Especially in the last few months, it has been so incredibly hard to stay original in my usage of terms and words. I feel like my sentences have grown more plain, scenes are losing depth, and metaphors are used over and over again, causing them to lose their meaning. But right now I just can’t pull it off to improve.

Although the current draft is done, and has gotten much further than I could ever hope for, the book itself is still far from done. You guys’ feedback and opinions have proven that it is simply not yet ready for publication. So what is going to happen now, you may wonder? Well, I’m glad you ask! I’m gonna be extremely busy in the month of June, so I’m glad to have a break off of writing for a few weeks. An after that, I am going to think. A lot. Trying to work in the much-needed structure for the plot and conciseness for immersive characters. I will be going over every single point of critique and apply it one by one as I will be scrolling through the whole text once more, also trying to take a critical view on my own work too. This will probably take quite some time, and I don’t expect this to be finished before the end of summer. This will also be the last time I am planning to propose considerable changes to the scenes. I have come to realize that the story has some fundamental issues that are deeply rooted into its fabric, and I won’t be able to change unless I will rewrite everything once again. I don’t want to go to those lengths again. I feel like I have grown as a person and grown as a writer ever since I finished the first draft, but simply can’t process my capabilities as the story feels like it is still running on Windows XP. At some point it is time to call it an end, accept the flaws that cannot be taken out, and bring my lessons to an entirely new and different writing project sometime in the future.

So, in summary, I will be going through all the feedback and placing pointers through the second draft over summer. And after that, all of those pointers will be rewritten as I work on the third draft after summer. I certainly don’t expect this to take as much time as the second draft, but I find it hard to tell when I would be able to wrap that up. I’ll be starting my MSc thesis after summer too, which is gonna be a whole year of full-time torture, so it really depends on how much time and energy I have left besides that. In any case, I hope you guys will remain patient as I work everything out, and I cannot thank you all enough for the incredible support and invaluable feedback you provide. I would have long given up if not for all of you. Each and every one of you has my sincerest gratitude.