{"id":22701,"date":"2026-02-12T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=22701"},"modified":"2026-02-10T12:09:04","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T19:09:04","slug":"making-steady-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/making-steady-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Steady Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"533\" height=\"800\" src=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COTF-test1-533x800.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-21930\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COTF-test1-533x800.jpg 533w, https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COTF-test1-267x400.jpg 267w, https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COTF-test1-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COTF-test1-450x675.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COTF-test1.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 533px) 100vw, 533px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>Now that we&#8217;re in a good daily routine again, I&#8217;ve been making steady progress in <em>Captive of the Falconstar<\/em>. I&#8217;m a little more than halfway done with the AI draft, and around 15% done with the human draft. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So far, there have been no major creative blocks, which is a good sign. The middle is always super messy, but I think I nailed the outline, because the AI draft has no major issues so far\u2014and with a solid AI draft to guide the human writing, I&#8217;m consistently hitting 2500 WPH and higher. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In practice, that means that I should have a final polished draft of this book by the end of March. If I had more time to work on it each day, I&#8217;d have it done even sooner\u2014perhaps even as soon as this month. But right now, all I can manage is about half an hour (if that) in the early morning, an hour in the evening, and sometimes as much as three or four hours on Saturday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not as much as I would like, but better than nothing. And without the way I use AI to generate a first draft, I probably wouldn&#8217;t be finished with this book until September or October, and it would be the only full-length novel I&#8217;d manage to publish all year. (Though realistically at that point, I&#8217;d probably have to go on indefinite hiatus and stop publishing altogether, until the kids grew up and left the house).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>After <em>Captive of the Falconstar<\/em> is done, I plan to work on the human draft of <em>The Soulbond and the Sling<\/em> and the AI draft of <em>The Soulbond and the Lady,<\/em> until the first book is finished and ready to publish. But I won&#8217;t actually publish it until I have the first three books ready to go, since that way I&#8217;ll be able to rapid release the first trilogy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Depending on how things go, I will probably put <em>Captive of the Falconstar<\/em> up for pre-order by the end of the month. I don&#8217;t usually do assetless pre-orders, but if I&#8217;m reasonably certain I can have the writing finished by the end of March, then I don&#8217;t see any reason not to give it a launch date and set things up to go. It will probably be available to read sometime in May or June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t know when I&#8217;ll have the third book of the trilogy finished, but if things go well with The Soulbound King series, there&#8217;s a chance it will be finished by the end of the year. I&#8217;ll probably finish writing <em>The Unknown Sea<\/em> before I move on to <em>Lord of the Falconstar,<\/em> just because I want to write and publish another Sea Mage Cycle book before the end of the year, but depending on how things go with <em>Captive of the Falconstar,<\/em> I might move the sequel up in the queue. Otherwise, it will probably come out sometime in early 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that we&#8217;re in a good daily routine again, I&#8217;ve been making steady progress in Captive of the Falconstar. I&#8217;m a little more than halfway done with the AI draft, and around 15% done with the human draft. So far, there have been no major creative blocks, which is a good sign. The middle is&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/making-steady-progress\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Making Steady Progress<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1567,1542,1626,1806,1846,1838,1831,1830,1829],"tags":[925],"class_list":["post-22701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-captive-of-the-falconstar","category-falconstar-trilogy","category-lord-of-the-falconstar","category-sea-mage-cycle","category-the-rise-of-the-soulbound-king-trilogy","category-the-soulbond-and-the-lady","category-the-soulbond-and-the-sling","category-the-soulbound-king","category-the-unknown-sea","tag-news-and-updates","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5U9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22701"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22855,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22701\/revisions\/22855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}