Somewhere north of 2000 words later, Bob finally pressed the period key with both gusto and ceremony. His first chapter! He already knew that it needed some pretty heavy editing, but he had promised himself to keep his need for perfection in check and to push through with a first draft.

Shaking his head as he thought about that weird dream again, he opened the door from his office to fetch a glass of water. Huh. All the lights were off. His wife must have given up on waiting for him. "When the office door is closed, please don't disturb me if possible," he had requested, and he felt a pang of gratitude that she had respected that wish. Filling up the glass, he wondered what to do now. He was still tired and should go to bed, but the feeling of expectation, of elation, was strong. He knew sleep would not be possible yet. Taking his phone out of his pocket, he did a quick search. So, a normal book is around 90 thousand words. I'm... two thousand words in. Just another 45 sessions like this. And then, of course, hundreds of hours of editing.

Bob felt the adrenaline rush wavering. He had been so pumped only minutes ago - he had started on his book! But at this pace, it would be months until he had finished the full book, and could show it to anyone else. He knew the book would probably suck big time, but he was a firm believer in putting in the work to get good at something. The dejected feeling deepened when he thought about the next steps after that: getting a publisher to even read his manuscript would be impossible. He remembered reading that some of the greatest authors were rejected hundreds of times before being published. He would be lucky if his wife agreed to read the book.

Walking back to his home office, struggling to keep his motivation up, Bob suddenly recalled a book that Lucy had recommended to him some months back. Skeptical at first that he would like something his teenage daughter recommended he had loved A Practical Guide to Evil. The story was published on WordPress or something weird like that. When Bob had read it, the full book was there, ready to be consumed from start to finish, but he had understood from the comments section that the chapters must have been released one at a time when it was first released. Curious...., he thought.

Bringing up the Guide on this computer, he looked around and found out that the format was called a web serial. From there, a quick search brought up tons of links to investigate, and he felt his excitement grow again. Web serials were stories where the author released the chapters one by one. Each single chapter standing on its own, garnering interest, comments, and engagement from readers. That was exactly what Bob needed to keep his motivation up!

It didn't take Bob long to find a likely place for him to publish his project. His story was a classic sci-fi, and he was trying to emulate the wave of British authors who had taken the 90s by storm. Authors like Banks, Reynolds and Hamilton were some of his favorites, and he felt on solid ground when he wrote about spaceships and alien civilizations.

There was a web page which specialized in publishing fantasy and sci-fi stories, mixing in something they called progression and LitRPG. Bob had no idea what that was about and made a note to look more into that tomorrow.

For now, he liked this NobleStreet site better and better. It had what looked like thousands of stories, and surely there must be tens of thousands of potential readers?

He created a profile and decided to use the current wave of enthusiasm and spend some time editing his chapter before heading off to bed.

Bob opened the editor again and stared hopelessly at the words on the screen. They all looked fine to him. Individually, they were perfectly good words. No red lines from the autocorrect, and the words made up sentences that made sense. Still, something was off. There was something lacking there. A type of bounce that he associated with good writing.

Bob realized there was more to being an author than stringing correctly spelled words together in a row.

He remembered a course they did on technical writing at work some years back, and how they would harp on about passive and active voice. Apart from that, he had little experience with editing, and he realized that he actually had no idea what he was doing.

As he was messing around with the verb tense in the same paragraph for the fifth time, he decided that enough was enough. He headed off to bed, trying to sneak carefully under the sheets to not wake up Jane.

-

Knock, knock! Knock, knock! Knock, ...ouch!!!

Bob pushed out with his arms, hitting Aglaophonus in the chest and knocking him over.

"We are not doing another knock-knock joke!" Bob said in way of greeting.

Aglaophonus gave Bob a sour look. "Alright then." And with a mischievous grin, he continued, "Instead, you have to join me in brushing our teeth together!"

"Er. What? Brushing? What? Why?"

Stolen novel; please report.

"It's just that I need to brush, and apparently nine out of ten dentists say that brushing alone isn't enough to prevent tooth decay!"

Suddenly Bob understood his daughter, and her groans when he insisted on inflicting dad jokes on her. But before he had a chance to comment, Aglaophonus said,

"So, how is your story going?"

"It's... ok. I wrote a chapter. But I was going to edit it, and realised I had absolutely no clue on how to do it."

"Pfth. Editing." Aglaophonus almost spat the word out. "That's boooooring.” The creature folded somewhere between three and five limbs under his chin and looked thoughtful.

“But necessary, I guess - at least for a complete newbie like yourself. Do you want some help? I can help. Remember, I suggested we help one another?"

"Er... yeah?"

"So, let’s deal. I'll help with your editing, if you promise to help me on my quest."

"Quest? What is your quest?"

"Nevermind that for now. So. Do we have a deal?"

Bob considered his situation. He really wanted to become better at editing, but at the same time, he wasn't sure that making deals with mythical creatures was such a great idea.

"No. Not yet. Help me with the editing, and I will consider it."

"Hmmm...." Aglaophonus appeared thoughtful, before giving Bob one of his signature bows. They were fantastic bows, Bob thought as he waited. "Ok. I will do you one more favour for free," the siren said and snapped his fingers.

[New Skill: Editing (1/10)]

-

The next day at work was slow. Bob was between projects at the moment and spent some time updating the time tracking templates. Really, he was just adjusting some fonts, and adjusting the amber warning colour on the risk overview to be less scary. Steering Committees weren't really meant to notice the amber. It only created more work for him if they started asking questions about them. Red was ok - those were the risks he needed their help with. Bob had been in the game long enough to know that PowerPoint slide design was a crucial skill: You needed to draw people’s attention where you wanted it, and you needed them to overlook the bits you didn’t want them to notice. At the same time, it was critical to cover his ass if someone asked him four months down the line why he hadn’t informed them that the new servers had sunk somewhere over the Atlantic.

At last, his last meeting of the day finished. If it wasn't for the damned traffic, Bob would have rushed home to test out his new [Editing] skill. As it was, he had no choice but to be patient. Today he didn't bother trying to plot anything, focusing fully on getting his first chapter ready for publication. He even checked his messages on the way home to make sure he wouldn't have to turn around in the door.

-

Cherishing the hiss from the can of beer as he opened it, Bob brought up the editor. Chapter 1 was sitting there, waiting for him. Right.... Bob took a long pull from the beer and leaned over the keyboard. Immediately, he saw that the first page was a spaghetti of passive voice leading into an active voice, with commas and semicolons doing their very best to prevent run-on sentences from coming to full and respectful stops. That won't do, he mumbled to himself, replacing one word here, a comma there, and splitting a sentence into three.

Before he knew it, Bob had gone through the entire chapter. Editing wasn't so bad, was it? He thought, but something was nagging at him. He leaned back in his chair to read through the chapter from the start and soon noticed that he had somehow gone through 2000 words without once entertaining the thought of adding dialogue. But then, there was really nobody for Josh to speak to. Jack was dead, and his mother was still light years away. Should he add another passenger on the spaceship?

Then another thought struck.

How do people speak??

And; Josh seems kind of like... me.

It struck Bob that this writing thing was perhaps not as easy as he'd thought. At least his plot was pretty robust - he was particularly happy with the whole twin killing theme - that was sure to be a blockbuster idea!

Logging into the NobleStreet website, Bob briefly noticed that most books had a fancy cover, and wondered if he should put something together. His next thought kindly informed him that he had failed art class as a primary school student, stopping his career as a visual artist from ever taking off. Nevermind, Bob thought, and logged into his author profile. He can figure out the cover later. Perhaps he could get Lucy to draw something?

Bob felt a sense of ceremony as he clicked on the “Add New Work” button and began to fill in the form. Bypassing the cover art section, he tagged his book as “Science Fiction” and “Adventure”. Again, he noticed the tags for LitRPG and Progression, wondering what that was all about. Most of the most popular stories on the sites seemed to use those tags, and he decided to do some research into those genres soon. For now, he had a decision to make: What to name his book.

He tested out a few possibilities, saying them out loud. Josh’s Journey? The alliteration gave it a bit of zest. But really, Josh’s? That didn’t sound good. A Twins Tale sounded better, keeping with the alliterative theme, but something wasn’t… quite right.

He decided he had to give this some more thought, but he didn’t want to postpone publishing the chapter. I’ll do it together with the book cover, Bob thought, as he entered “Bob’s Book” as a temporary placeholder name.

He clicked “Publish!”, and sat back in his chair, only to see a message come up: “Thank you for your submission. It is currently under review, and will be released within 24 hours”.

Damn. Bob could see the sense in that, and if there was anything he was good at it was dealing with delays in processes as tasks had to be checked and double checked.

Should be ready tomorrow afternoon.

Bob leaned back in his chair. The web serial world had no idea what was about to hit them.