Muffler's Ministry: Final Draft Complete

That's it. This afternoon, I finished polishing the final (probably) draft of The Muffler's Ministry, coming in at 105,635 words. Phew. You'll find an updated preview of the opening chapters via the book's webpage on my site.

Structurally it was unchanged, although I did rename the chapters in the final part, as follows:

By final draft, I mean that I now consider it ready to submit to a few agents to see if I can get anyone interested in trying to get it published via traditional publishing. If (I can dream) that happens, then I'd expect further changes when a fresh editor gets involved. That's going to take at least a couple of months to see if it pans out.

If it doesn't, then I'd expect to self-publish this in early January 2021, in its current form, there or thereabouts. I should have my new author platform up and running by that point, via both Amazon and Draft2Digital.

I also have a new 4,500-word short story set just after the novel, called A Muffler's Vigil. This will form part of my free short story collection, Mutterings of Consequence, which you'll be able to get free by signing up for my mailing list.

Tomorrow, I'll be sending out my submission to around ten agents once I've selected them. I've got the opening chapters, synopsis and a base cover letter all ready for it, but I'll be tailoring the latter individually for each agent.

Then it'll be back to preparing all my existing novels ready to republish on my new author platform, while I'm nervously awaiting feedback from the agents. That involves three more short stories too, which I have sketched out, but not written.

Ideally, I'd like to get all that done by mid-December, but I think that might be a little optimistic. I've a loooong checklist of things to do.

Right, let's go hunt those agents...