Another Allegiance is still away with Cuzzie. She is nothing, if not thorough. Her progress has been hampered, apparently, by next door installing a new kitchen so she found it impossible to concentrate while all the banging and crashing was going on.

Hopefully,

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After more than a month of intensive editing, the book has now gone off to my proofreader for checking. That job belongs to ‘Cuzzie’ my wife’s cousin, who is the only person I know who I can rely on to be ruthless in her assessment. Editing is where so many independent writers fail.

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Editing is now well under way. I have completed the first two passes. As you may remember, the original first draft clocked in at 130,171 words. The total now is 121,044, a reduction of over 9,000 words. It actually fell to just over 119,000 at one point,

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Another Allegiance, Cover

As promised, the cover. This took quite a bit of searching but, as usual, Dreamstime came up with the goods. The first problem was Bruno. I needed a picture of a young man in a Wehrmacht uniform, who wasn’t wearing the familiar coal skuttle helmet,

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The first Draft is finished! 130,171 words, or 444 pages, regardless of how you care to look at it. The final word was Dodds, which is Alice’s surname – a fine old Northumbrian name. The story is now complete.

That doesn’t mean that the book is finished, though.

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I mentioned in my last post that things tend to speed up when I near the end. That post was only a week ago, but already I have passed the 120,000 word mark. I became so engrossed in what I was writing that it passed me by without my noticing,

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It is only eleven days since I announced that I had passed the 110,000 word mark. This morning, I made that 120,000. It is always like this when you write a novel. As you get near the end, you speed up. When toiling through the process to reach this point,

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As promised, this is your notification that I have passed the 110,000 word mark. The word was a not very helpful ‘when’. Every so often, I get a sudden spurt of inspiration. This usually comes when a major element in the story is revealed, as was the case yesterday. It is preceded,

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It has taken a while, but I passed the 100,000 word mark this morning. To be precise, I have now written 100,027 words, and the last one was ‘shock’. It has been some time since I announced passing 90,000 words, but I didn’t spend all that time writing. I discovered that my published works needed some minor revisions before Christmas,

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If you like your books to come in hardback form, mine are being made available that way, in addition to their Kindle, ebook and paperback editions. To date, four titles have been issued: Rutter’s Revolt, The Secret Angels, Rutter, Reborn and The Hunted Angel.

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