I Finished the Second Draft of The Mystery of the Body Thief

Greetings travelers, 

I wanted to let you know that I finished the second draft of the Mystery of the Body Thief on the 20th of May! The reason I didn't post this earlier was because I had a lot of other posts planned, and I wanted to take some time to write this post. (And not rush it). 

It feels so great to have the second draft done, because now I can move onto the third! And I have a lot of plans for the third draft. 

Here is a little bit of a behind-the-scenes for drafting. To keep myself organized I've been creating folders for the different drafts of my novel: 

I do this because I've written different scenes in different documents, and it is easy to lose them or confuse them because of that. I do not want to confuse the first draft with the second draft, nor the third draft with the second, or anything else along those lines. 

           But let's now move onto what is next for The Mystery of the Body Thief:

Synopsis-

Genres: Fantasy | Murder Mystery  Series: It is the first book in the Lady Annabelle Mystery Series. 

Horatio wakes up from being in a coma, but he doesn't remember anything that happened before he fell into unconsciousness. All that he remembers is a name, "Annabelle!" 

Also... Detective Inspector Time finds himself having to solve a case without Lady Annabelle.

Murders have been happening throughout many different kingdoms, and no one knows who exactly is behind it all.                

                  What's Next for The Mystery of the Body Thief? 

So as not to rush either story and to give more time to both, I have decided to divide the novel (which was originally 255,185 words) into two books. So as to be thoughtfully written rather than something that is just dashed off, this is going to be a book series. I suppose it is good that I already have three books planned out for it as opposed to just one. 

On another note, I have realized that the names are very inconsistent. I have characters whose names are common and others whose names are unusual (ones that I made up myself). I realized, after compiling a blog post as to what changed in my story, that the common names were left over from the novel originally being in the genre, Alternate History. To give it more of a High Fantasy feeling of another world, I decided I needed to rename some characters. 

I am in the middle of renaming Annabelle, Angela, and Marigold. Some names will stay the same like Horatio's. I realized, even though something like Lord of the Rings has fantastical names, they also have some real names (they are few and far between), but they are woven into the story enough that they don't sound strange. At the moment the naming for my story is all over the place, so I am going to try and fix that in the third draft. When I do change their names expect their profiles on this blog to be updated with their changed names. 

In the third draft I will also be continuing to world-build. I have more ideas for what the world is like, and the magic system has become much more clear to me, than it was before (before it was barely there). 

Also, since I was rewriting and reworking the story from 2018-2020, it meant that I had to give myself an outline for the third draft in this drafting. The scenes are much like Dolls of Wax Eyes of Glass's first draft, but that was because I was trying to make sense of stuff that I wrote years ago. And, I wanted this draft to give me an idea of how somethings will play out in the third draft. So I now have an outline that isn't my 2018 writing to work with. 

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What are your own approaches to editing? What are some of your favorite Fantasy names? 

-Quinley