Meredith Mansfield, Author

Well, first the draft has to be allowed to rest for a few weeks. I’ve been living in this story for about six months. I need to go get my head into some other stories (“Modgud Gold”, DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, maybe MAGE STORM) so I can look at it with fresh eyes. Also, making the cover:

Then it will need between two and four rounds of revisions (at a guess).

First, I need to go through for all the plot changes that happened during the drafting. I’m a discovery writer. That means that sometimes I go down the wrong trail and have to fix it later. There are places where I’ve changed my mind about who is present at a particular event. Where I’ve changed the motivation for certain actions. Where I’ve changed the timing of some events. Some things will need to be deleted (not many with this one, I think). In other places, I’ll need to add scenes or whole chapters. All of that has to happen first. It’ll require at least one revision, maybe two.

Then, I’ll tackle the usual round of things I always have to deal with in early drafts. When I’m writing dialog and it’s flowing, I don’t stop to add the dialog attribution—the “he said” or the little bit of action that combines with the dialog, that might be as simple as a facial expression or a bit of body language or might, if the stars align, allow some interaction with the setting. Also, all the little things, like the places I flagged because I used the same word six times in the same paragraph, but didn’t slow down to fix it in the first draft. That’ll also take at least one and maybe two drafts.

Then it’ll be ready for beta readers, hopefully by June. This typically takes another month or sometimes a little longer. They’ll tell me any places where my plot doesn’t work or is too confusing. Any times when my characters do something that doesn’t feel right. Where the pacing is too fast or too slow. They’ll also help me catch some of those nasty little typos. That leads to at least one more round of revisions, sometimes two.

And then the polishing edit.

Only then is it ready to format and send out into the world.