There’s not a lot to report in terms of writing from the month of October 2022. I spent the middle of the month traveling for my photography (www.dylanleesphotography.com), visiting the Pacific Northwest regions of Columbia River Gorge and Mount Rainer National Park.

I love the Pacific Northwest, and felt rested and inspired as I stood at the foot of towering waterfalls and hiked by rocky streams — but I didn’t do any writing while I was there.

For the start of this month, my latest drafts (collectively termed Draft 3.1 in my byzantine system of edits) were out for review by my highly select group of beta readers. I had the feedback by the time I left for my photo trip, and tackled the editing on my train trips out and back: with almost 40 hours spent on the train in each direction, there’s plenty of time to get down to business!

As of this writing, all of those edits are done, and I am preliminarily considering the trilogy complete. As it stands, the completed volumes are:

The Shadow of the Ruin (134,600 words)

The Gathering Darkness (145,600 words)

The Second Sundering (114,100 words)

For a complete story totaling 394,300 words. I made my original goal of completing the entire trilogy in under ten years, if only barely — December 2022 will mark the tenth anniversary of this writing journey I’ve undertaken.

Which means it’s now time for querying!

(nervous face)


In addition to edits for my main creative project, I also posted the second installment of my Writer Reaction series, covering the two books of the Kingkiller Chronicle. You can find it here.

Finally, I’m making plans to update the blog, moving to a darker color scheme for improved readability, and trying to figure out something better to do about the banner image. The update is still very much in the conceptual (read: I have no actual idea what to do) phase, but I hope to tackle it by the end of the year.

And that’s all for October!