Over the last few weeks, I finished the second draft, and now the manuscript is where it belongs, in the hands of readers. Granted, it is a select group (my family), but so far they are enjoying the story. But still, there is something satisfying to know, after all the time spent alone in the closet, that your words are reaching out to someone else.

I won’t get too philosophical here. It starts to sound smarmy.

The other fun part about the beta version of the book is that I had lulu.com print 3 copies, and I plastered “NOT FOR SALE” all over them, in case one gets lost, and gave them to my beta-readers that way. It sure beats reading loose-leaf MS pages.

(In case you go to lulu, and try to find the book, I’m sorry, you can’t. They’ve got a nifty feature where you can mark the book as “private” and no one but the author can order copies. You’ll have to wait for the real deal, just like everyone else.)

I’ve also put the progress on the next book at the bottom of the page. Still generating ideas, but I do have the basic plot outline, and I’m starting to read my research books. (Sorry, no clues there, either.) The beginnings of a book are a little more gelatinous, a little more free-form, so it’s hard to “chart” it out exactly. Ideas accumulate, and at some point, I sit down and start typing.

Also, I’ve been researching agents, and working on proposal letters. Not as fun as writing, but necessary. More on that later, when there’s real news.

Finally, we’ve been doing a Bible study in our men’s group that is phenomenal, all based on Romans 12. Shows how each of us is to interact with God, each other, and the world at large. Good stuff.

Check it out.

After working for weeks now on the second draft, I now know how long it really takes to work through it.  Silly me thought I could do it in a week or two.

The good news is I’m more than halfway done with that, and am plugging on toward the end.  ’Twill soon be done.

As an aside, I was intending to post some of the research material that went into this first book, which is, as you would know if you read the About the Story page, set in Victorian times.  Quite a few books detail this era, and innumerable works of fiction also come from then.  It can be safely said that there is plenty of material to read.

Here’s the main group of books and resources I used:

• Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (’cause it’s all about London)
• Judith Flanders’ Inside the Victorian Home
• Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
• Charles Dickens Oliver Twist (for all the orphan scenes)
• Divided by a Common Language (to get all those English slang words just right)
• Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (’cause it’s funny)
• The Dictionary of Victorian London (where Lee Jackson has kindly done all the work for me)
• The Victorian Web (good for a general overview, and some good pics)
• Shakespeare Search (’cause I’m too lazy to read all the plays again)
• And of course, Bible Gateway, the Word at your fingertips

I know there were other things that contributed, most notably movies and other things I’ve googled and forgotten, but that’s the core of it.

I’m a little worried about having enough material for the second book, which takes place a little earlier.  I won’t reveal too much about that, though.

Also, great stuff being posted on Michael Hyatt’s site:  this one, for example.