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After writing 50 novels (17 under SKQ and 33 under my paranormal romance penname) in the last 10 years, not including a substantial number of novellas, short stories, unpublished works, and that one rather unfortunate screenplay, I have a pretty good handle on how to write a story. Which isn't to say each one isn't a new challenge, particularly since I insist on making them a challenge by, oh, deciding to write a medical thriller inside of a paranormal romance or trying to decipher what hopepunk really is and writing a whole series (in part) to explore that.
But if that experience buys me something, it's that when I get to the end of a story, it often doesn't need a lot of revision. I write the story I want to tell and... fin.
This one is different.
When You Had Power is a short-ish novel (first of 4 in the Nothing is Promised series), but there is a lot going on. Hopepunk, AI, green tech, climate crisis, and a character who's an engineer and gets her nerd on. Plus a mystery-suspense. I've got more notes about this series than wordcount in the book. But the revisions aren't actually about all that—cleaning up the worldbuilding isn't "revision."
Because this hopepunk stuff is such a different way of telling stories, and because I have a lot I want this poor little book to do (Jump! Higher! Now with style! Oh and deliver a message about violence as an organizational principle!), that's not getting done in the first draft. Hell, I'm still figuring out what the story's about. (Don't worry—this is a sign the writer is intuitively integrating a lot of themes and producing something that's amazing, or possibly that she's stumbling through the words with only a vague notion of what they mean. One of those.)
In short, it will take some revising before I know I've told the story I want to tell.
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