This week, I’ve been prepping Sky Raiders for publication. Again. I recently announced in my newsletter (which you can sign up for here) that we’re working on a new cover and new interior formatting, and that it will be available in both ebook and print. The graphic design company I’m working with has asked for the manuscript of the book in a Word document. This should be a straightforward request, but for me (and I suspect many other long-form writers), it’s presenting a few minor complications.

Sky Raiders is about 129,000 words. (For comparison, that’s a little longer than the first Twilight novel, and a little shorter than Ready Player One.) It’s a lot of words to keep in one document, and word processors tend to tucker out at those lengths. (First they stop checking spelling and grammar, and then they stop loading, which is a problem.) I mostly use Google Docs for my writing, but because it can’t handle that many words in one document, I break it up into four separate documents. (Conveniently, this was also how I outlined Shadow Hawks—in four parts.)

Because of this, I’ve been copying and pasting each chapter into Scrivener, an application for long-form writing. I haven’t been able to figure out how to copy over the formatting, so I’ve been parsing through each chapter of the book, hunting for italics, and loosely re-reading Sky Raiders for the first time in a couple of years. It’s been a bit of a bizarre experience. Personally, I like to think I’ve grown a lot as a writer since I first published Sky Raiders in 2021 on Kindle Vella. So sometimes I look at the dialogue or the structure and tell myself that I would write it differently, if I were writing it now, in 2025. But I’ve sworn to myself not to make any changes to it—and actually, it’s also been fun to sink into the story again. Every time I read it, I remember that it was a story I wrote for myself, with all of the ideas that were important to me at the time, and still are. I know how it ends, but I still can’t wait to get there.