Fractal Legacy Redraft Plans

I thought it was worth providing an update on my redraft plans for Fractal Legacy and how I intend to publish the trilogy.

I received my son's feedback on the latest draft at the end of last week, and had a chance to chat with him about it over the following days. As always, his notes were exceptionally useful and annoyingly accurate. He'd managed to highlight all the areas I had residual concerns over, plus several more that were worthy of consideration.

I've taken a few days to think things through and come up with a plan of action. Actually, I've two plans. One is straightforward and would be a perfectly acceptable approach to addressing the issues. It would just need a linear tweak from the beginning to the end of the novel, mainly fixing explanatory problems and character arcs. Easy. Should only take me one to two weeks.

The other is more significant. I had a couple of modestly brilliant ideas over the weekend that could make several aspects of the story more significant. It will need a few new scenes, rewriting – or at least reframing – several chapters in the first third of the novel, and the deletion of around a chapter's worth of material at the end. There's a whole thread in the finale that could be easily excised to make it more effective. This would take at least a month, likely two.

Guess which one I'm going to do? I never take the easy way out. There's a certain pride in doing the best job I can possibly do, so I really couldn't do anything else. I'll report back once that draft is complete.

Once that's done, it will need one final read-through and minor edit. Then I've decided to self-publish the entire trilogy in one go. As I've mentioned before, submitting a trilogy to get an agent is a little more complex, but the overriding reason is that after working on this for well over a year, I want to get people reading it. This way, I can have it on the market well ahead of Christmas.

Right. Onwards. Let's start the first chapter in a slightly different place. No point making life easy for myself now...