{"id":22703,"date":"2026-03-12T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=22703"},"modified":"2026-03-10T07:59:22","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T13:59:22","slug":"finishing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/finishing-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Finishing Up"},"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>I&#8217;ve passed the 50% mark of the rough human draft for <em>Captive of the Falconstar,<\/em> which means that I&#8217;ve got about 40k words left to go. Since I&#8217;ve been averaging between 2,000 and 2,500 words per hour, I only need about 20 writing hours to finish it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I also have to finish the AI draft, which is somewhere around 80% done, but that shouldn&#8217;t be too difficult. Add maybe another 5 writing hours for that. Also, I plan to do a full human revision draft, and a final polished draft, which I will probably start this week. Those should each take between 16 &#8211; 20 writing hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So let&#8217;s see:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>AI draft: 5 writing hours<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Rough human draft: 20 writing hours<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Revised human draft: 20 writing hours (conservatively)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Final polished draft: 20 writing hours (conservatively)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>So all I really need is another 65 writing hours, and this WIP should be done and ready to move into the publishing queue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s the thing, though: I only get between 1-2 writing hours per day. I usually watch the kids while my wife is at work, and since we&#8217;re in March now there&#8217;s a lot of outdoor work that needs to get done, like pruning the apple trees and prepping the garden. So it&#8217;s going to be really hard to squeeze out any more writing hours than that. I do usually get more like 4-5 hours on Saturdays, though, while my wife watches the kids. But since we keep sabbath, I don&#8217;t write on Sundays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So realistically, I can only get about 10 writing hours each week. Which means that I probably won&#8217;t finish this WIP until the second half of April. I was hoping to finish it by the end of this month\u2014and if I had a solid week where I could write full-time, I probably could\u2014but realistically, it&#8217;s probably going to take longer than I would like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, the good news is that it&#8217;s all going really smoothly. No writing blocks, no major story problems or hangups. Just a lot of putting in time and doing the work. And even with the chores and outdoor work, I do still get a good amount of writing time. My wife is really good about watching the kids in the evening, and it really helps to get out of the house to write. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I am very confident that <em>Captive of the Falconstar<\/em> will be done by the end of April, enough that I will probably put it up for preorder in the next couple of weeks. As for the next book, I plan to work on it in the fall, but it probably shouldn&#8217;t take more than 3-4 months, even at my current pace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve passed the 50% mark of the rough human draft for Captive of the Falconstar, which means that I&#8217;ve got about 40k words left to go. Since I&#8217;ve been averaging between 2,000 and 2,500 words per hour, I only need about 20 writing hours to finish it. I also have to finish the AI draft,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/finishing-up\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Finishing Up<\/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],"tags":[925],"class_list":["post-22703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-captive-of-the-falconstar","category-falconstar-trilogy","category-lord-of-the-falconstar","tag-news-and-updates","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5Ub","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22703","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=22703"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22967,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22703\/revisions\/22967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}