Progress report #5

Unstable Orbits

I’ve paused all direct promotion via social media or advertising for now. I spent most of 2025 standing on virtual street corners honking my horn, and it’s time-consuming as well as not being my natural habitat, or particularly effective. I’ll resume when the audiobook is ready.

Reviews and ratings

From a friend, sure, but an extremely pleasant surprise:

Source

Audiobook

I’ve finished the initial edit of the audiobook (10h 52m), and I’ve learned a lot during this process. One important realisation was that my project layout was in need of improvement. I’d originally thought “one track per scene” might be a good way to arrange everything, and it turns out that I’m an idiot. I’ve now implemented a much better system: a track for narration and separate tracks for each character voice. I’ve traded vertical scrolling (scenes as tracks) for horizontal scrolling (an 11-hour timeline).

An equally important realisation: I needed to rework some character voices, and some narration especially early in the book. Partially the tone of voice, partially a lack of consistency.

I’ve started a second pass to address those issues and to improve my editing. I’m about 40% through that pass.

Alongside this pass, I’ve been investigating the various filters I’ll need to process the audio: noise reduction, compression, de-essing, limiting, and so on. I’ve watched some videos about this, which of course makes me an expert. Annoyingly (and typically) they’re very good at explaining the how — how to twiddle the settings and how this affects the output — but not the why or the when, which is what I need. Blindly copying the settings used in a video for one particular voice doesn’t help me understand why that setting needed twiddling at that point.

I’m getting there.

AXIS book 1

I’ve completed draft three. Compared to draft two, the total is up around 1,200 words, but the changes aren’t distributed equally:

Chapters 1-5: down ~400 words
Chapters 6-10: up ~300 words
Chapters 11-15: up ~500 words
Chapters 16-20: up ~900 words

(Those deltas don’t add up to 1,200 because of rounding.)

This is broadly what I was aiming for.

As I suggested in the last progress report, the final book won’t have chapters numbered 1–20: each scene will become its own chapter. That means 65 chapters, ranging from ~500 to ~2300 words. I think this works.

I’m calling draft three the first beta. It’s had some great feedback so far. This book isn’t like any of my others, and the use of language is extremely different, so I’m very pleased with that.

AXIS book 2

I wrote the first draft of AXIS book 2 at the same time as the first draft of book 1 – it was originally going to be one book, not two. Now that book 1 is settling down, I’ve reviewed my first-draft comments for book 2 and started a rewrite revision.

Book 2’s first draft is longer than the first draft of book 1, so I don’t think I’ll need to add as many words overall in the rewrite revision as I did with book 1. (The target is again 80,000 words.) On the other hand, some changes I made when revising book 1 will have consequences for book 2.

So far in this revision I’ve reached the end of chapter 3 — roughly 16,000 words, exactly where I want to be, and up by around 4,000 from the first draft. (As with book 1, I’ll number the chapters differently for publication. The current chapter numbers are milestones for me to measure progress.)

The current plan, subject to change, is to be substantially happy with book 2 before I release book 1. I don’t have a release date yet.