Getting there, but slow going.

Just.  About.  Done.  With.  Spires.  Of.  Infinity.

I have to say that this final draft has been kind of excruciating.  I'm just about there, though.  Maybe another week or two and it will be completed.  It really feels like beating my head against the wall here, because I've read this book through about 10 or so times already and that's not even counting the 8-10 times I read through the original version of Spires before this rewrite.  This is why I took a bit of a break, because after so many times reading through it, you kind of stop seeing the actual text and anything that may be wrong with it.  And most of the changes I'm making this draft, though necessary to raise the overall quality of the writing, are so small no one but me is ever even going to notice them.  I got about halfway through the final draft and then thought, wait a minute, there's one more thing I need to do to polish up my prose a bit, and had to go all the way back to the beginning.  I've made a few thousand small changes, and dozens of other medium sized changes.  There's been a handful of larger scale shanges too.  Most of the changes I'm making are just to fix paragraph structuring issues.  Mostly to vary my sentence structure from sentence to sentence so I rarely, if ever have two sentences with the same structure one after another.  All of the other changes have been to add more character and background to Sam and Gabriel, and to build up their friendship a bit more.  I've added about 13k words, which is kind of a lot more than I really wanted to.  I was trying to keep the word count around 100k, but it's now balloned up to almost 115k now.  These changes are massively for the better, though, and I'm happy with them.  In my opinion the characters are a lot more well rounded now, and their friendship feels a lot more genuine.  But, of course, I may be just a tad bit biased on that.

So yes, I am still working.  I know it probably seems like I've just been playing video games all year from what I've posted this year, but I really do want to get this book finished, and then get Memories of What Never Was finished as well.  I think Memories only needs one last draft with the same treatment that I'm giving Spires this go around.  I'm not really looking forward to it, though, because Memories is half again as long as Spires, and this last draft of Spires has taken me months.