That was a test of attention and persistence.
Book 19 is done! I had a lot of rewriting on this one. I knew it would be trouble when I wrote the first draft. Making the setting plausible--where technology doesn't work--is a difficult bit of explanation. I went back and forth on that every other editing round. I finally settled on a little bit of mystery. It doesn't have to be fully explained. It just has to be plausible. Good enough.
I enjoyed the story, but I found a lot of issues in editing needing rewriting. And I'd go back and forth a bit on some small issues with each round of edits. I also would find my usual issues and hope that I caught all of those.
In the end, it's MUCH better than the first draft! If you could compare the first draft to the final draft, you'd see the dramatic difference in quality. First drafts are getting the ideas down and all the pieces in some format or another. However, there are always word choices to consider. And I caught a few inconsistencies to fix. I hope I didn't miss anything. 😔
Sometimes, as with this, details change in big ways, but most of the time, those are good enough to need only minor tweaks. This story had a lot of unusual pieces to it, especially since the secondary characters of the world became almost equal to the series characters in terms of importance in this. Developing those characters adequately and their lives required a lot of work.
In any case, I'm glad it's done, although I worry about what else I should fix. Art is never finished, only abandoned. I would go on fixing forever and never publish if I didn't stop myself at some point.
ALL THE KING'S MEN is done! The ebook will be appearing in the next few days at online retailers.
Happy reading!