The End of the Beginning. Our first draft is complete.

As some of you may have seen on our twitter feed yesterday afternoon, we have now finished our first draft, writing 78,032 words. That means we completed stage 1 of our 90 days challenge in 27 days, a little ahead of schedule.

We're now moving on to our editing stage. This will actually be several editing stages.

Firstly, we're doing a self-edit over the next few days. This is to iron out the obvious inconsistencies, grammatical errors and typographical problems that typically creep into something of this length (and written at this speed!).

Once that is done, we're turning it over to a few alpha readers to gauge opinions on how the plot hangs together, believability of the characters, and how interesting the story is in general.

After that we'll be working with our editor to do substantive editing following by as many rewrites as are necessary.

Then we'll open up the editing to a larger number of people to beta read. We may ask for volunteers here at that point.

Finally, we'll go back and iron out the problems our beta readers spot.

Once more to our editor for his thoughts, and fixing any new issues the changes introduce.

Then we'll do a final proof or ten, format it for kindle and set her live on the store.

Somewhere throughout that we'll also be sorting the artwork, and trying to work up our marketing strategy, so although we've now got the first draft finished, the 90 days challenge is far from over.