The last six months have been a whirlwind! I left my job and started a new one, I’m almost done with my master’s, and I’ve been digesting and incorporating the feedback from my developmental editor into the fourth draft of Not by Sword.

Working with editorial feedback has been a new and exciting experience for me! Specifically, my editor has helped me uncover the heart of my characters and my book. I outlined the plot of Not by Sword, but I feel like I’ve been discovery writing the characters. When I started, Milo was just a blank page, a stock Chosen One archetype. By the time I got to the end, he had a personality, desires, and some trauma. With each draft, he has come alive a little more, almost like chipping away at a rough statue to make it more lifelike on each pass. My editor helped me see that I was trying to go in too many different directions with Milo at once. I needed to drill down on his core motivations, his deepest want and need. Now that I’ve identified those, I’ve rewritten the beginning and ending to resonate better with Milo’s internal arc, and I’m going back through my book and pruning all the dead limbs.

For instance, Milo’s relationship with King Gera will be central to the conflict of the next two books, but in this novel, the death of Milo’s mother is much more critical to his growth and his journey. My editor helped me see that I was spending too many words and too much of Milo’s emotional energy on the king and not enough on his mother. And Milo already has a positive relationship with his own father. So, on this editing pass, I’m pruning some of the father-son interactions between Milo and Gera.

As a personal note, my schedule with my new job has changed, so instead of a leisurely daily hour for writing between 8:00 and 9:00 am, I’m getting up at 5:00 to write before work. I have gleefully fallen into a raspberry tea addiction to support this writing schedule. (If you work for Pure Leaf, please sponsor me!)