Now that “The Nav Computer” is out the door (both eBook and paperback), I’m focusing my energy on the 4th book of the Daphne series called “Stolen Property.”

I started writing the rough draft for this book on April 26th. There’s a couple of weeks’ overlap between these two books as I finished the rough draft for “The Nav Computer” around May 16th. That book ended with a word count of around 49k and I decided to add a few scenes. That brought the book up to 52k, which is about the right size for a short SciFi book.

“Stolen Property” was up to 52k and I was almost done (I only had two or three scenes to finish the book). I ran into an issue toward the end and didn’t like how the book went. It just didn’t have a bang at the end. So, I reworked the ending a bit and still didn’t like it. I let it sit for a day or two, then late at night I sat at my computer just typing “what if…” on a word document. After a few ideas came into my head, I had to back up and rewrite the last 1/4 of the book. I was able to salvage three or four scenes in the middle and ended up throwing out 13k words. Now I’m back to 46k words and about 8 scenes to end it.

In this revision, I really got pumped when I put the rough draft together and a bunch of things happen that come together in a major scene at the end. It’s a completely different ending, but it’s so much better.

I’m sure your next question is: “When will it be ready?” The rough draft will be complete by early next week. Normally, I’d have it done by the weekend, especially since I’m putting down 2k per day during the week. I have a commitment for this weekend, but that’s OK, it’s summer and I have all next week to work on this. I expect by Tuesday I’ll start editing it. I’ll do a read-through and fix any inconsistencies. That’ll take at least three days. A quick grammar fix pass will take a day. Then my wife and I will go through it together. She reads, I fix. We did “The Nav Computer” on Saturday (all in one day), but we pinky swore that we would never do a whole book in one day again. So we’ll probably break it into two to four days of editing. She wants to spend more time and effort on thinking about the story and I’m more than happy to let her.

Doing the rough estimate on this means that the book should be ready in August. Maybe the first week.

Unfortunately, I haven’t started a single word on the next book. So, it’ll feel like the 5th book takes longer to produce than the previous 4. That’s only because there’s no overlap of books this time. If I can sustain 2k per weekday and 6k on a weekend, it should take less than a month to write “Supercomputer.” Plus the time to edit the book.

Do I have plans for more books? If there’s an interest in the series, I already have another 5 book ideas and a prequel that I want to write as a reader magnet. Of course, anyone on my email list now will get a link to the free book when it comes out.

Stay tuned.