Well, I've finished the 2nd draft, and started the 3rd.
Many of you are no doubt wondering what was done in the second draft, what's in the 3rd, and how many drafts there will be.
These are good questions. ;) For the 2nd draft I read through quickly and fixed all the spelling, grammar, and typos that I could find doing a quick read through. The 3rd draft will be edited for voice, tense, story flow, and showing vs. telling.
No, that probably doesn't require another draft, but this way I have a (reasonably) clean copy to go back to if I royally screw something up.
For my helpful proofreaders, please send in anything you have to fix. I'm sure I missed a bunch of grammar errors, and what would be most helpful would be to point out if I brought up a plot point early in the story and didn't follow up on it. (Some of these are intentional, and will be followed up on completely in later books, but I want to make sure I didn't skip follow up on them completely.)
One of the main things I'm working on in this draft is editing for showing vs telling. As an example of this, at one point in the story, Tomed outlines in a meeting some information that Jake got for him. In the third draft I'm adding a scene that follows along with Jake as he gets this information. This gives us some more action instead of just listening to characters talk about things. Also, it lets me flesh out the character of Jake some more.
Well, that's all for this update. Hopefully the first of many that actually details what I'm doing instead of just blathering. I need to add comments to this update feed... in the meantime, please feel free to e-mail updates to me at yoda47 at jedisaber dot com.