This past month, I finally moved past the planning stage and started committing actual bits to a file for the rewrite of The Shadow of the Ruin. It wasn’t my most productive month ever, but it was a start.

In total, I completed 5 chapters this month, totaling 16,574 words.

I have had to revise my original length target for the rewrite upwards a little. I’ve kept with something very close to the same structure as the original, which means 45 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue. So far, I’ve been averaging about 500 fewer words per chapter than in the first version. That would mean a total length reduction of about 22,500, but I think I can go above that even at my current pace; the longest chapters are yet to come, and they’ll have the most length cut from them.

So far, here’s what I have completed:

Prologue: Previously 4,871 words, now 3,312 (-1,559)
Chapter 1: Previously 3,835 words, now 3,297 (-538)
Chapter 2: Previously 4,706 words, now 4,347 (-359)
Chapter 3: Previously 3,840 words, now 3,283 (-557)
Chapter 4: Previously 2,212 words, now 2,335 (+123)

Writing new versions of the same material — some of it things I wrote almost ten years ago now, that went on to become formative sections for the entire story — has been an interesting experience. I’ve deliberately avoided directly reusing anything from the first version, and sometimes the way I end up writing the same section now is very different.

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And that’s just about it for the month of October. November has gotten off to a slow start; I participated in a 10 hour online race with two teammates on the 5th of November, and spent most of my free time in the first week of November preparing for it. Although I intend to get back on the writing soon (tonight, in fact), I have lost some productive time to that event.

My goal for the month is now to complete 8 more chapters, or two per week. It’s a modest goal, and hopefully that means I can achieve it. We’ll find out when I write the next of these!