Life of a Manuscript

Every writer works differently, and every project has a slightly different progression, but this is roughly how it works for me:

0 - Planning
Think about what I want to do and let the ideas build at the back of my mind. Write a couple notes on bits and pieces of paper. Try not to lose the bits and pieces of paper.

1- First Draft
This usually happens quickly, because I tend to use NaNoWriMo (the "write 50 000 words in one month" yearly challenge) to dash out a quick and dirty draft. I'm a pantser, so I don't have a lot of notes when I get started either. I just start running down the hill and hope I don't fall on my face.

I tend to leave my drafts alone for at least one month before picking them up again.

2 - Heavy Editing Round
This is when I take the draft and beat it bloody. Many writers overwrite, but I do the opposite. This means that a 50k draft will be a 65k draft by the time I'm done with this round. I regularly rewrite entire scenes just because I don't like how they flow. This takes 4-6 weeks, because I progress like a turtle, a few pages a day until I'm done. Editing when you're sick and tired of working leads to bad work.

Here, I annoy a beta reader or two to help me find problems I didn't notice.

3 - Light Editing Round
This is cleaning up. Fixing plot holes and contradictions, weeding out overused words, working on any issue pointed out by beta readers, cleaning grammar messes, etc. This is usually the work of a few weeks.

After all that I can throw the manuscript out on submission. When it's accepted, it gets even more rounds of editing of course. But that's a different process.

(Right now, The Fox's God is sitting between step 2 and step 3. One of my friends is helping out, as well as my awesome long time beta. I'm waiting for their feedback anxiously.)