Progress report #4

<- Progress report #3

I’m happy to report that I reached my unofficial goal for the end of 2025: recording all scenes of Unstable Orbits for the audiobook (pending re-records), and completing the major overhaul of AXIS 1. Still a lot of work to do for each, though.

Unstable Orbits

Reviews and ratings

Goodreads has a new five-star rating for Unstable Orbits, from a reader in Australia. If that was you, thanks!

There’s a new five-star rating for the book on Amazon too. It might be the same rating, mirrored from Goodreads, I have no idea. Happy to see anyway, as high ratings on Amazon are social proof of quality and act as a sales driver.

Audiobook

I’ve recorded 99 of 100 scenes. The one remaining scene to record is “closing credits” and I’ll tackle that once everything else is complete.

Editing is a long way behind: progress there is at 73% rather than 99%. The scenes still to edit are all less than ~1100 words long, so edits will speed up now. Some scenes have needed re-recording in part (occasionally in large part), as my narration voice was rough or tight for some reason. Oddly, in a recent scene the narration needed re-recording but the Roscoe voice was perfect (I love playing Roscoe).

AXIS book 1

I finished the rewrite revision of chapters 16–20, completing draft two at 81k words (about 320 pages). The equivalent text of draft 1 was 60k words (remember that I’m turning draft 1’s 125k words into two books, codenamed AXIS 1 and AXIS 2).

The final five chapters in draft two are deliberately shorter to increase the pace. I’m considering flattening the whole book so that each scene (draft two has 66 scenes) becomes a chapter, rather than grouping scenes into chapters. But I need to see how that looks after draft three.

I called draft two a “rewrite revision” because I didn’t update the manuscript in-place, adding and tweaking words in the existing text. I started from a blank sheet of metaphorical paper and (mostly) retyped. This process engages the brain differently and naturally leads to more significant changes. You’re giving yourself permission to say more and to vary from the established path. It’s a method sometimes used by screenwriters once they’ve battered out the story: now they know what the movie’s about, they can write the script properly.

And it’s also more fun. It feels more like writing than rewriting, and writers like writing more than rewriting even though most writing is rewriting.

I’ve now started draft three, which is very much not a rewrite revision. I’m fixing inconsistencies (especially in language use), and looking for better words and phrases. The goal is to complete this draft by the end of January, and then see what a few trusted readers think of it. I’m currently about half way through, and I’ve deleted about three hundred words along the way.

If you want more frequent updates on draft three, follow me on Bluesky or Threads. I post every couple of days with some choice quotes from the scenes just revised and some pointless stats.