After many years of drafts and months of waiting for feedback, the moment has arrived! My editor wrote to say that after this draft, the book is done! So far the line edits are just that—removing phrases and tightening language here and there. I hope to sail through these final edits in the next month and turn the book in to copy edit!

While thinking about how long this process was, I dug into my emails as I wanted to see when this whole thing began. I started working on the novel idea in 2016! That’s 8 years ago. The concept, outline, and first third of the book was finalized in 2018—three years after concepting began. The book sold in 2019, and we’ve been four years in drafting. (Which, I guess is not that long, considering we’ve done five drafts during that time frame.) What an incredible journey.

One thing I’m learning about novel writing is that it’s most definitely a collaborative project. I don’t say that to mean the writer isn’t the creator—I say that to mean editorial direction shapes the final project. If a writer had time, it would be interesting to see what would result in a book that started with the exact same first draft but had different editors. I think the differences between the books would be significant. Here’s what happened to my book since the first draft.

• DRAFT 1: My first drafts are horrendous from a craft perspective. I just throw the story down as I’m trying to figure out the pieces and the arc. It’s almost like a proof of concept. The first draft was well received. The comments in that round covered everything from character to story arc to ending. And there were some things to resolve about the villains.

• DRAFT 2: I went deeper into character development and continued evolving the story. The editors hated it! I strayed too far from draft 1. There was a big crises and a few meetings. Oops. Writing alone, I’m used to wildly changing my story from draft to draft. That doesn’t work so well in an editorial relationship.

• DRAFT 3: I stitched together draft 1 and draft 2, using the shape of draft 1 and the characterizations I had developed in draft 2. Editors were gratified and felt the book was back on track. The feedback on this draft were about developing the mystery over the course of the book. It also focused on the evolution of the character, making sure her perspective changed over the course of the novel as things happened to her.

• DRAFT 4: As I addressed the book’s mystery and the main character’s emotional evolution, I also worked on craft, making dialogue more natural, smoothing out transitions, and massaging the text. I also developed yet another perspective for the villain. Once again the draft was well received, but there was a request for major cuts—they wanted the story to be a page turner, to move quickly and carry the reader along.

• DRAFT 5: Working on streamlining the text was like doing a puzzle—and I love puzzles. I had to find scenes that were unnecessary, stitch together the pieces of the chapters that remained after the cuts. I also took the opportunity to add nuance to the two of the characters based on feedback from my cultural reader. The cultural reader’s main goal was to give feedback on New Orleans references in the book. So in this draft, I also made the updates to some of the references to the city. And once again, tweaked the villain and the ending.

DRAFT 6: And here we are, at draft 6. It’s just line edits as two editors went through and cut phrases and sentences that weighed the narrative down. This round is a breeze—as it should be, but I’m taking my time anyway to be sure that I’m happy with the final product.

It’s been quite a bit of work and taken quite a bit of time to get the manuscript to this final stage. No matter how frustrated I felt receiving round after round of edits, it was clear to me that the book was getting stronger with each editorial round.

I hope to soon be announcing book reviews, the book promo page on my site, and the re-release of the book cover. I’m looking forward to all these signs of life for my novel because it’s been such a long, long journey to get here.

Here’s to the fruition of long projects. May you find ingenious ways to evolve your projects so that they can go the distance.

Onward!

—K.

Art: The 10 of Wands from the Light Seers tarot deck by Chris Anne