I haven't provided an update on my writing progress since my 2021 NaNoWriMo recap, so it's time to let my readers know that things have indeed been moving on that front since November. For starters, I accomplished my goal of finishing the first draft of the sequel to Hopeless by the end of 2021. I just made it by the skin of my teeth, wrapping it up on the last day of the year.
Since then, I've been editing the manuscript. After a two-week break, I spent the remainder of January and all of February on my first revision pass. As expected, this comprised many changes because the first revision pass is where I make sure the story makes sense and that I'm telling it the way I want to. I wound up re-writing the ending of the book during this phase.
I made my second revision pass during the month of March. This is where I fix my writing, including cleaning up spelling and grammatical mistakes. At the beginning of this month, I began the third revision pass, and I'm focusing on tightening up my writing and catching any mistakes that slipped through the second phase. My goal is to finish this round of revisions by the end of April.
Depending on how clean I feel the manuscript is after the third pass, I'll either embark on another round of revisions or pass the story along to an editor. In either case, I believe I'm still on track to release the as-yet-unnamed sequel to Hopeless in the middle of this year. I'm excited because this will be the first sequel I've ever written for one of my novels, and I look forward to writing more books in this series!
