Glencrow Summer Production Time Line

 

The original painting that I used for the cover of Glencrow Summer

I began writing Glencrow Summer on 25th of August 2024. The original working title was Glencrow Lodge, it's title sort of a companion piece to Chateau Clare, which, at the time was out to my beta readers. And being out to the beta readers, I had nothing to write. I like to write, and so, idle hands being the devil's workshop, I decided to start on my next book. While I had the basic ideas for the story, as described in previous posts, and enough of the plot to at least set out to tell the story, I did not have the the clearest idea of where it would end up. All I knew was that it was going to be a "What I did on my summer vacation" type of story. Thus, it was something of a leap in faith, not just because I didn't have a clear idea of what I would do with the premise of Glencrow Summer, but I was far from confident that Chateau Clare would find an audience, and seeing that  Glencrow Summer is more to the same, the whole project was rather iffy. I had, however decided to write the stories I wanted to write regardless of their reception, so I set out writing it, iffy be damned.

Another painting inspired from the story - the gate to Glencrow Lodge

The choice of naming the book and the locale is a little nod to a family of crows who seem to "own" the top of our hill. Hence, the Loc Lore Rey district river I named the Crow River, so its valley, or glen, and lodge became Glencrow. It would have been more colorful to name it Glenraven, but we don't have ravens around where I live. We have crows. I like crows. 

The writing progressed without a hitch. The story fell into place as I went along. The only thing that I slightly unhappy with is it's ending. Oh, it's fine enough ending, but... Well I best not say anymore. I hate spoilers, or even hints of them. You may see what I mean if you read the book.

I finished the first draft on 8th of November, with 90,245 words written in 82 days. As long as I have an idea of what I need to write, I can write 1,000+ words a day, working, these days, an hour the first thing in the morning, and optionally, coming back to it in the evening for an hour or two, when things are going well.

Another painting inspired by the story

I knew however that I would be adding more words to the second draft. Not only because I usually do, but because I knew I had rather sketched in some scenes. I also knew that I had time to do so since neither my wife nor my beta readers would be able to read the story until after the holidays. I expected to add about 10K words in the second draft. I usually don't wait long to start my second draft since the first chapters have already been sitting fallow for three months. So I started my second draft on the 10th of November, and wrapped it up on the 28th of November, coming in at 106,435, i.e. more like 16K than the 10K I was aiming for, which was fine with me. I've never been a believer in cutting, cutting cutting your story like the experts say to do. One reason is that because my stories are first person narratives, the extra words are useful to paint the narrator as a character; for it is the character who is "writing" the story, not some professional novelist.

This was an earlier treatment of the road and gate to Glencrow Lodge

I started on the third draft, hoping this time to just tinker with words and sentences rather than paragraphs, and correct any mistakes I might see. I started on the 9th of December and finished my third draft on the 18th of December with a 106,981 word draft. A slight increase. Usually I'm comfortable with three drafts, but with time to spare, I decided to do a fourth read through, this time in Google Docs rather than in LibreOffice. Ideally this would be done on an ebook reader so that I could experience what readers would experience, but that makes corrections cumbersome. Reading in Google Docs not only made it look different enough to see what needed to be fixed, if anything, but it has a better grammar checker than LibreOffice, so I made all the corrections it highlighted. I finished this fourth draft on the 22th of December, coming in a 107,294.

After this, I uploaded the book chapter by chapter to the free, web based Grammarly grammar checker and corrected the errors it found. I ignore it's free grammar suggestions, and its punctuation suggestions, as it doesn't like commas, even in places where you would think they belong. I then took these corrected chapters and upload them, again one by one,  to the free on line Scribbr grammar checker. It still finds mistakes - wrong words and such - that both Google and Grammarly missed, and adds commas where they are missing but should be.  

Once I reassembled the book, a few days after New Years, I printed it out and handed the paper manuscript to my wife to proofread. Unlike the old days were there were ten or more typos to fix on every page, my current process means that many pages escape unscathed, with no mistakes found at all. Only after I fix the mistakes she finds do I sent it off to my beta readers. I only sent it off to three beta readers this time, as I didn't hear from four other ones with Chateau Clare. I assume they didn't care for it, and this being more of the same, I thought I'd best spare their feelings.

And that is the story of Glencrow Summer's writing.