After a slow month in June, I was mostly back on schedule in the month of July. I took a few days off to compete in the iRacing 24 Hours of Spa (we finished 7th, but had a disconnect that cost us a potential win), but otherwise I didn’t miss more than one day in a row of productive writing.

As the title implies, I’m now getting very close to completing the complete tear-down rewrite of The Shadow of the Ruin. Barring some catastrophe (and I don’t want to tempt fate considering the last twelve months), I am well on course to complete the first draft by the end of this month.

Yay!

In total, my writing accomplishments for July were:

• 17 writing days
• 26-3/4 productive hours resulting in 18,673 words written
• 5 completed chapters

The time to words ratio isn’t very strong for this month, but a lot of that time was taken up figuring out major structural changes to a pair of key chapters. I’m happy to say I did manage to find solutions to those tangles, and I think the new versions of those chapters are shorter and snappier without losing anything in impact or favorite bits of dialogue.

Next month, look for a write-up on the full rewriting process — because by then, I should be done!

There should also be a new Writer Reaction bit coming in between, in which I nitpick another popular work of fantasy for not being perfect.