Murder in Heliopolis - Progress Update

A quote from Ch. 1 of Murder in Heliopolis, the second draft.

 

Since I started my new writing routine, I've written a huge amount. 

Murder in Heliopolis's second draft stands at about 12k words, and it's only been three or four days! Within this new draft, nine original scenes have been edited and five new scenes have been added in the POVs of other characters. This is more than I had originally planned to add in these first three chapters in my revision notes.

New POVs so far include:
Fleur Verdi
Toma Pom
Grot Antrum
Cassia Grove
and one more POV that is purposefully not named 😉

I have also made a new portrait for one of the MiH characters, and am considering re-making the rest of the portraits I had already made (Laith, Warda, and Afan) in this same style. They would just be more realistic pencil drawings, so the style would change dramatically.

A quote from Ch. 1 of Murder in Heliopolis, the second draft.

So, it's a lot. And that's just Murder in Heliopolis. What about the long posts I've written about worldbuilding or the snippets I've written and scheduled? I'm certain they'll take that word count up to around 15k in total. Alhamdulillah!

A big reason for this is because at the start of my new writing routine - the very start of my entire work day, shall we say - is a two-hour uninterrupted writing session, with the option to extend it for another hour if I'm on a particularly good roll. 

I think it's the best way to set up any kind of writing routine that I need to follow, because at the very least, if I can put down a certain amount of work in my projects, then it doesn't matter how well I do with completing the rest of the writing routine. Everything else is just icing on the case after those first 2-3 hours of my routine.

And that's extremely helpful, because there are days when I don't want to do anything, but a two-hour writing session, which might yield 2,000-4,000 words, can at the very least help me feel like I've accomplished something with my day, and can even motivate me to do other things with my day.

I've just finished working on Chapter 3 of Murder in Heliopolis, so I'm looking at about 26 more chapters to go before I'm done editing the chapters which I have already released on Royal Road. From there, I'll be adding new chapters - writing the second part of the story from scratch - so that process will be: drafting, revising, editing again. 

There are a couple of things I'm noticing already during this edit.

First, I'm noticing that I'm downplaying Laith and Warda's experience as Muslims. I'm going to stop doing that. 

In fact, moving forward as a Muslim fiction author, I want to be much more forward about sharing the Muslim experience and what Islam truly is for Muslims around the world.

Second, I've got so many worldbuilding and OC intro graphics to share but I haven't shared a single thing yet! I'm going to try and schedule some worldbuilding posts so that at least once or twice a week, there's a regular Murder in Heliopolis update you can count on.

These posts will hopefully explain a lot of things to you, answering questions like:

What are Slates?
Where is Heliopolis located?
What is PATET?
What is Laith's backstory?
Why is every single setting so cool?

...and more!

Stay tuned. 😎🌿