Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

I passed yet another iteration of Designers & Dragons Origins to Evil Hat this afternoon.

This is my four-book sequence of product histories for Dungeons & Dragons that I first wrote for DnDClassics from 2013-2017. (It's actually just the OD&D, AD&D 1e, and BD&D histories; there will be more.)

I figure I'm on about my billionth draft by now: lots of writing is actually revising and editing and revising and responding to edits and responding to comments and etc ... And I'm deep, deep into that for these four volumes.

I likely did three drafts of each product history when I wrote them for DnDClassics:

1. Research & write each product history
2. Edit the product history
3. Edit the product history again, the night I posted (usually Sunday night as I recall)

I think I did five more major drafts before submitting to Evil Hat:

4. Revise/update/regularize/expand each product history
5. Edit the full chapter.
6. Edit the full book.
7. Incorporate comments.
8. Edit the four-book sequence

This is on the high end for my drafts, on the one hand because I did the product histories and then the books a few years later, and on the other hand because it's not just a single book, but four books.

I passed the books off to Evil Hat about nine months ago and I've seen them through four back-and-forths of editorial comments and corrections since. The first one was just book 1, but then when book 2 was edited, there were also some minor new edits for book 1 to ensure consistency. Etc. Etc.

Which I guess means this is the lucky 13th draft. (At least for book 1, which got minor edits every time another book did.) Yikes! This new draft was the most major since I handed it to Evil Hat last year. For one, I added cover artists to all the book listings, and added a few new discussions of covers (there were already lots). I also went over some comments we got from a cultural expert on my writing on books like Oriental Adventures and Drums on Fire Mountain. I think it was around 9 days work.

Very happy to see the books back with Evil Hat. I think I'm likely to do one more draft, as I wrote enough fresh text that our editor and cultural expert will both likely have some responses, and then maybe it'll finally be ready for layout? Whew.

As I said, this was a somewhat high number of drafts for my usual work, but there would probably be at least half-a-dozen drafts for most of my books, not counting editing that I do of previous sections as my way to get back into a day's writing.

That's one of the reasons I constantly have the next book in progress and the next and the next. Because it allows me to do fresh creative things and not just editing the thing I wrote last year!