Last night, I finished transcribing the rest of the handwritten manuscript. I also started to layout the book for print, which will form the basis for the ebook edition that I will release first. This means, I have my first complete draft of the novel and will now begin the process of editing it as a whole.

As it stands, the novel encompasses 22 chapters. With front and back matter, the book is 113,844 words long. In my current paperback-style layout, that comes down to 360 pages.

My next step is to do one big editing pass through the complete book. After that, I should have a version I can give out to test readers. After some feedback, I’ll decide where to take it next. My current plan is still to publish at least the ebook version by the end of the year, with a print-on-demand run following later.

I’ve also designed a cover for the book:

As you can obviously see for yourself, I’ve decided to overhaul the entire website for this project. When I launched the original site a couple of years ago, the idea was to simply have a place where you could read parts of GRIM DEEP while I was writing the novel. But recently, I’ve found myself looking for a place to document my world building for the project and eventually decided the best idea would be to do that publicly, right alongside the novel. The result is this new, slightly more involved design for the website.

The new setup also gave me the opportunity to include posts on the homepage of the site and I decided to go for this. Which means from here on out, short updates here on the blog will keep you in the loop on what’s been going on with the writing and publishing efforts in relation to the book. I might also share other relevant details concerning the project once in a while, we shall see…