Revisions Behind-the Scenes

Hey there! Long time, no chat!

I’ve been deep in the revision cave for the sequel to Den of Liars, but I turned that sucker in yesterday and have finally come up for air! So, pull up a chair, brew up a mug of something warm, and let’s catch up!

Hooo boy have I been busy. Since my last newsletter, I’ve drafted nearly 50k of a new book (!) and done an entire round of revisions on the aforementioned sequel to Den of Liars. It’s been a lot! But I feel so unbelievably lucky to be able to call this my job. It’s still surreal.

Writing a sequel has been a huge source of growth for me as an author. Sing Me Forgotten and A Forgery of Roses were both standalones, and Den was the first in this duology, so it felt very similar to writing a standalone (the only difference being that I had to leave a few plot points open-ended to lead into the second installment).

Sequels, on the other hand… All I can say is now that I’ve done one, I have even more respect for authors who write massive series, because WHAT. That was SO hard.

Building character arcs for characters you already did arcs for in book one in a way that doesn’t feel like they’re going backwards? Having to stick to magic system rules I established for the plot of book 1 except now I’m working with a DIFFERENT plot? Delivering more of what readers loved about book 1 while trying to make it different enough to be exciting? Building more of the world and adding more characters while not making the book 1,000 pages long? THIS IS ROCKET SCIENCE PEOPLE.

Anyway. Point is, it was HARD and I ate a lot of CARBS and it nearly KILLED ME but I MADE IT and now it’s handed in to my editor so I can CRY IN THE FETAL POSITION because I am SO PROUD OF MYSELF.

I hope you love it. Lola, Nic, and Enzo are a party in this one, let me tell ya.

So, while I wait for line edits and copy edits, I’ll go back to work on my other project and try to play catchup on all the things I had to neglect while in the deadline cave. Yay!

Stay tuned for a title reveal SOON! And also pretty COVER ART! You won’t want to miss it, I promise. ;)

Back when I was first starting out writing books, I’d go to writing conferences and take classes and read craft books and work on my own stuff, and I’d hear all these authors talking about doing revisions. In my mind, I thought that revising a book was similar to what I did in high school and college for my English essays—moving the words around a bit to make sure what I said made sense, adding in commas where they were needed, verifying I did my MLA citations correctly… that sort of thing. Maybe a bit more doctoring of the prose to make sure the right vibes and atmosphere were coming across, checking to make sure characters’ eye color didn’t change halfway through the book, and varying up overused words.

I WAS WRONG.

Shannon Hale once said that writing a book is like shoveling sand into a sandbox, revising is when you make the sandcastle.

Similarly, VE Schwab says drafting is taking the fragile, beautiful glass ball of your idea and throwing it against a wall. Revision is taking all those pieces and trying to make them resemble the glass ball again.

No matter what your metaphor is, the point is… revision is where the vast majority of the magic happens. It’s like the iceberg meme:

Case in point: the sequel I just finished.

I started working on this book in summer of 2024. Here’s the breakdown of the timeline so far:

June - July 2024 (2 months): Putting together the outline, getting it approved by my editor

August 2024 - mid-October 2024 (6 weeks): writing the first draft

mid-October 2024 - end-of-October 2025 (a little over a year): REVISING

And that’s not even including the line edits and copy edits I’ll be doing over the next month or two, plus pass pages after that, which is where I’ll read through the final text again once it’s typeset and formatted to make sure everything is in place.

(Also, please note that that year I spent revising this book did have chunks of time where I’d sent it to my editor and was waiting on notes, so it’s not like I was working on it directly every single day of that year, just to be completely clear, but it was still a LOT).

So, while fixing up prose and adding commas are part of the process (line edits, typically, is where that stuff happens), what makes up the bulk of revisions?

It’s called “Developmental Editing,” and it can include:

• Rewriting the mansucript from scratch, if needed (did this for Sing Me Forgotten!)

• Rewriting large chunks of the manuscript (hello, A Forgery of Roses!)

• Rearranging scenes for emotional impact—which then means you have to edit the scene so the new timeline makes sense (SEQUEL I JUST FINISHED, I’M LOOKING AT YOU)

• Combining characters

• Consolidating plot points so that one scene accomplishes what multiple scenes accomplished in the first draft (did you know that the original version of Den of Liars had FOUR rounds in the Liar’s Dice Tournament, not three? Yep. I had to combine all the emotional stuff of two whole rounds into one, including all the romantic beats that occurred between Lola and the Liar during those rounds. That was SUPER EASY LET ME TELL YA)

• Building out the world or magic system

• Removing subplots or adding new ones

• Streamlining character arcs

• Developing characters—including secondary characters so they don’t feel pointless or like cardboard cutouts

• Building higher stakes and motivations

• Adding, removing, or changing backstory

• aging up or down, if necessary—I’ve had friends change a book from YA to adult, which can affect every single scene in a book

• so much more

For an example, why don’t we talk a little bit about Sing Me Forgotten? If you haven’t read it yet, don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything!

The initial draft of SMF had Isda working for Cyril at a BANK, y’all, where she extracted people’s memory elixir so they could use it to buy things. Memories were literal currency, so people had to have their memories extracted in order to, say, pay rent or buy a horse or whatever. She met Emeric in the first scene where he comes to get his memories extracted. (Peek the earliest drafted version of the moment Isda and Emeric meet below! ;) Emeric didn’t even know how to make CARAMELS, y’all. He was a jeweler’s apprentice!

When I dove into revisions, I decided that I wanted to keep the overarching storyline—phantom-esque character meeting a cinnamon-roll boy and falling in love leads to her deciding she doesn’t want to put up with how she’s being treated anymore, which then triggers a villain arc where she becomes the phantom of the opera. Problem was, this first draft just wasn’t powerful enough. It felt a disjointed having Isda going from the bank to the opera house. It lacked focus and immediacy, the stakes weren’t as high (because she wasn’t as isolated), and the vibes/atmosphere weren’t where I wanted them.

I decided that if I was going to write a Phantom of the Opera retelling, I wanted it to capture the same feelings you get from the Broadway musical, which meant that I needed to REALLY GO THERE. Build an opera house that feels like a character. Make the atmosphere tangible—gothic and glittering and dark. Infuse the prose with melodrama and musicality. Make the characters more morally gray and nuanced and flawed.

So I scrapped literally everything about that initial draft except for about two pages (the scene where the chandelier falls—iykyk) and drew up an entirely new outline. I wrote a new book from scratch… but this one was much better than the first, because I already had a grasp on the characters and their journeys.

From there, I still had to move things around. Make Isda’s relationship with Cyril more believable, expanding their emotional intimacy by adding scenes with them interacting. I had to develop her relationship with Emeric more, so I inserted moments where they connect and others where they fight. I had to add in the backstory of Les Trois (Isda’s predecessors who gave gravoirs a bad name) so it would make sense why people would fear her so much.

It was a LOT. And the book is so much better for it.

Usually with the first developmental revisions, I don’t even bother using Track Changes in Microsoft Word (where the program highlights what you’ve changed in red) because what is changed is so extensive that having it highlighted is useless. The whole document, almost, is littered in red. It’s typically on the second round of developmental edits that I turn on the Track Changes.

To get an idea, below is a zoomed-out snapshot of the second round of developmental revisions of the Den of Liars sequel (this is what I spent the past two months working on):

Not a single page is free of corrections. Most pages have massive amounts of red.

Last draft, I turned in a 129,000-word manuscript. This one ended up at 102,500 words. That is a ton of stuff cut/streamlined/consolidated.

Anyway. All that to say… if you’re writing a book and it’s rough and you feel like there’s no way your work will ever compare to George RR Martin or Usula LeGuin, just know that their first drafts likely were massively different from the final copy you read. First drafts are just that… the first draft. It can be as bad as it needs to be. You’re just shoveling sand into a sandbox—it’s not going to be pretty until you’re able to make sandcastles out of it. <3

To celebrate having turned in the Den of Liars sequel, let’s do a giveaway! For this one, I’ll give away THREE signed copies of Den of Liars, and winners get to choose whether they want the US edition or the UK one (see the comparison below).

To enter, just comment on this post OR respond to this email telling me which edition you’d prefer! Giveaway closes November 4, 2025 at 11:59pm EST. US residents only this time! I’ll contact THREE winners to get their US mailing address where I’ll send the books. <3

Thanks so much for following along! Hope you all are having a lovely spooky season! So excited to be able to share the cover for Den of Liars’s sequel so soon—make sure to stay tuned!