Good news, the rough draft of Circle of Ashes is done! It ended up at about 183,000 words when I completed the draft… and as of now, when I’ve edited about… 1/3 or so, I’ve managed to cut it down to below 180,000 so far. Just lots of restructuring of sentences, removing redundant lines, and all of that. I also suddenly had a particular writing rule I’ve struggled with for ages finally click, which has allowed me to remove a lot of dialogue tags (asked, said, replied, and so forth).

So far my ...