“Oh, so you’ve finished that draft you were working on. Awesome. What’s next?”

It’s a question I’m frequently asked.

In my case, I’ve just finished draft two of the manuscript of book one in my young adult fantasy trilogy. After a private ‘huzzah!’, I’m now planning my next move: putting the draft away and not looking at it for a couple of weeks.

Seriously.

Distance is key. Right now, I’m too close to what I’ve written. I need to let it lie for a bit, let it simmer, read a book or two in the meantime, then come back to it with fresh and, hopefully, much more objective eyes.

From there, it’s a full read-through to see how it all comes together. I won’t make any changes as I read it, but will jot down a few notes if anything glaring jumps out at me.

My main concern will be the big picture stuff. The second draft has already addressed a lot of the shortcomings in the prose from the first draft through vicious, brutal rewriting. I think maybe 20% of my original draft survived the massacre—the first draft was basically word vomit to get the story on paper anyway.

What I’m looking at now are things like pacing, continuity and character, and making sure these are all working as intended. Sure, I’ll tweak a sentence here and there for a bit of extra spit and polish, but that’s not the focus this time.

Once I’ve made my notes, I’ll start draft numéro three—this draft shouldn’t take me anywhere near as long as the last one. By the end of it, I’ll have brought my manuscript to a point where it’ll be just about as good as I can get it without external feedback.

Enter the editor (dun dun dunnn!).

I’m currently putting feelers out there in order to size up and hire a freelance editor, and have already received some fantastic recommendations through my Masterclass friends and Masterclass mastermind, author Fiona McIntosh.

When I’ve decided on an editor, I’ll probably engage him or her to do a full structural review for me after draft three, and use the constructive criticism I receive to complete draft four after which I’ll ask a handful of beta readers to read what will be the near-final version.

Once I have some reader feedback, I may make some final tweaks but then it’s time to submit to publishers. Woo!

Still, there’s a bit more of the mountain for me to climb between now and then—wish me luck!