After 5 months, I am officially finished with my third (or maybe fourth?), and hopefully final, round of developmental edits. I’ve now implemented everything that I discussed with my editor back in January and things should be aligned not just for the plot of this book but to set up the rest of the series.

But the work isn’t done yet! My hope is that I will receive the same grant for 2027 that I had for 2025, so that I can work with the same editor again to ensure this manuscript is ready to start querying publishing agents and fine tune the plan for the rest of the series. For that to happen, I’ve still got a few more things on my checklist to get done.

It starts with fleshing out the books that exist in this world. I want to use quotes from them at section breaks, so I need to write out some of the passages at length to ensure they flow nicely.

Then I need to plot out books two and three. I have a rough draft of book two done, but so much has changed over these past two rounds of edits, so I need to sort out everything I have planned and start identifying where I still have holes. I also realized while working through things with my editor that I need to break out the rest of the series into multiple POVs where I originally had the whole series from Willow’s POV. That means figuring who gets to tell each part of the story, what everyone is doing at different points, and keep everything cohesive.

Finally, I plan on giving this manuscript one last read through, doing some lesser edits to clean things up, and getting everything ready to work with my editor again (fingers crossed!).

So while I feel hugely accomplished, there’s still several stops left on this journey and plenty of work left to be done along the way.