AQATWW: Word Shuffling
I am working my way through Alexandra Quick and the Wizard War, doing my first editing pass. So far I am mostly just going chapter by chapter fixing superficial things and shuffling words around. I'm about 25% of the way through.
"Word shuffling" is actually a very bad habit during early stages of writing. It's always easier to go back through what you've already written and find sentences to tweak than it is to write new sentences, and you can (and I do) easily spend an entire evening just poking around with rewrites. You should not do this! But for some writers (like me) it's an itch that's hard not to scratch.
I wasn't entirely successful in avoiding this trap during the first draft, but I did usually manage to force myself to keep going rather than revising. The downside of that is that now there is a lot of mess to clean up.
Right now I'm still doing "easy" revisions. Questions I never really answered remain unanswered, plot holes I haven't plugged yet are still there. I will have to address those during or after my first pass.
This light editing pass has already reduced the word count to 384,568. That's over 4000 words trimmed so far! Of course when I start doing the "heavy" edits I might end up adding a new chapter.
Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment
My test proof of Alexandra Quick and the Deathly Regiment arrived!





These are chonky books! The print quality (from Ingram Spark) is not bad, but it's not great either. These books won't stand up to rough handling or being slung around in backpacks, and as you can see, the art could be sharper. But you can print your own copies with the downloadable PDFs I provided here. You will have to provide your own cover (the full-resolution cover is an exclusive I reserve for friends and a few other folks), but anyone can do this with a Print On Demand service like Ingram. The setup cost for me was $49, and the cost of printing and shipping one copy was $19.40.
Alexandra Quick and the AI That's Getting Better At Hands
Stable Diffusion is still too much fun, and still hard to wrangle, but here are a few more sneak previews of AQATWW as SD starts to replace Poser as my digital tool of choice.



