DUNE 7 BLOG

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Draft 8 Finished

Late Sunday evening, and I can finally collapse back in the office chair.

I've just completed the last "real" draft of HUNTERS OF DUNE, and the finish line is in sight. In the past week I have edited close to a hundred pages per day, making the last pieces fit in place, adding the final tweaks, trimming down slow spots, extraneous paragraphs, repeated descriptions or explanations, moving a few small scenes. The book now stands at 578 pages, trimmed down about 50 pages from previous drafts.

The first four drafts or so required quite a lot of massaging, rearranging, rewriting, adding scenes, shoring up explanations and motivations. By Draft 5, HUNTERS finally seemed to be shaping up into what we wanted it to be. Now the manuscript is very very close to meeting our standards of what we think one of our DUNE books should be.

I have already sent this draft off to Dr. Attila Torkos, a DUNE scholar and expert, as well as being our translator for the Hungarian editions. He will give it a final check for accuracy against all the other DUNE novels.

Tomorrow I hand the manuscript to my wife Rebecca, who will go over the whole thing with her "editorial crysknife" -- line by line to check the prose for inconsistencies, grammar, and sense. She's written thirty novels of her own and has over twenty years' experience as a professional editor, so she really makes the text shine as well as it can. Then I'll do one more quick read from start-to-finish, and then by around the middle of March it goes to the publishers for full-scale production.

(In case you're wondering, during all this, Brian is charging full-tilt through the fifth draft of SANDWORMS, and we are on the phone at least every other day to remind each other of details or hints that need to be consistent between the two volumes.)

Almost there! I hope to post Chapter 1 later this week, for another sneak preview.

--KJA

PS -- note that we have also added some links to other DUNE-relevant organizations next to the tip jar. If you feel inclined to chip in, but would rather your money went to something other than website upkeep, I have joined or contributed to each one of these groups and I think they deserve your support.