What’s it a draft of?
Funny: I don’t have a name for it. But it’s my first installment for a planned series, set in the far future within the Andromeda galaxy. Humans are one of many species and resemble a third world nation in political power. I was inspired by George RR Martin’s initial concept for Game of Thrones: take something you really enjoy (Fantasy, or in my case Soft Sci-Fi) and complicate it with depth and lore you could only get from an extended book series.
The story is about the Terran Republic’s Civil War, starting off with six-point of view characters (4 Republic, 2 Alliance) but it will probably expand in future books. The Senate votes in favor of a new bill banning all blue-collar jobs (this is in the far future, so robots are already doing this too much extent, and physical labor is technically more dangerous than anything by this point). But while it’s not going to harm the inner systems, the outer systems are pissed. Not only would it harm their economy, but the Electoral College is also clearly biased in letting a few populated worlds have all the say. Plus, Tygar Heavy Engineering owns most of the robots and they have a long history of corruption – are they pulling the strings to enhance their profits?
The key to understanding this is no one is the bad guy. Each faction is justified. There are a few sadistic characters here or there, but they are fighting for the same cause as one of the heroes. It’s all a matter of perspective.
The outer worlds threaten to succeed from the Republic as the Alliance of Free Planets. To solve the situation peacefully, the factions agree to last-minute negotiations aboard a Terran Star Dreadnought, in neutral space. And that’s where the first book starts off…
Have any of you guys ever used a professional proofreading service?
For my wip draft, I’ve just been using Grammarly. It does a good job (for a droid). I’ll proofread it myself during revisions.
Interesting. I wonder how it would handle a fantasy novel with a lot of made up names and words? I’m having eyesight troubles unfortunately, which will make proofreading more difficult.
It often calls a made-up word a typo, but it almost never auto corrects, so you just have a (more visible than normals word spell check) line you can hover over to fix or ignore. I like it, but worst case scenario you could always try increasing the font size and proofreading from there.