Author Diary Entries

198: How I wrote this novella in 8 weeks (plus the editing process and number of hours to do it!)

• Sagan Morrow • Episode 199

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In this episode, your podcast host and why choose romance indie author Sagan Morrow shares behind the scenes all about the writing and editing experience for her upcoming romcom novella, Love By Design! Get an inside look at the overall journey for how the book writing and editing process went, the specific methods she used with examples for what she worked on during various rounds of writing, rewriting and revising, and editing, and the specific number of hours it took for her to complete this novella over the course of just 8 weeks. 

(As a reminder, this book, Love By Design, is the sequel to Small Town Stilettos. It’s a very cute forced proximity, “why choose,” insta-attraction, friends to lovers, small town romcom.) 

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You’re listening to the Author Diary Entries podcast. I’m your host, Sagan Morrow, and this is episode #198. Access the show notes and transcript of this episode at SaganMorrow.com/podcast. 

We are officially just TWO WEEKS AWAY from release day for my next “why choose” romance novella, Love By Design! Very exciting! It is now available for pre-order at your favourite e-bookstore, or visit SaganMorrow.com/books. 

In today’s episode, I'm going to share behind the scenes all about the writing and editing experience for this book — overall how it went, and then the specific processes I went through and what I was working on for various rounds of writing, rewriting, and editing, and then I’m also going to share with you the specific number of hours it’s taken me to complete this novella. 

(As a reminder, this book, Love By Design, is the sequel to Small Town Stilettos. It’s a very cute forced proximity, “why choose,” insta-attraction, friends to lovers, small town romcom. You can learn more about it and the back-of-book blurb in the previous episode of this Author Diary Entries podcast, episode 197.)

Now let’s get into the writing and editing process for Love By Design!

The overview… 

This has been the easiest book to write since the first novella I published back in 2018. I think part of that is because I haven’t been putting pressure on myself: With Love By Design, I wasn’t trying to hit a specific word count or add layers of storylines; if I had an idea but it wasn’t quite working, then I scrapped it. Whereas in my last couple books, I pushed through to make those scenes work; I was also TRYING to write full-length novels rather than novellas, so I was deliberately looking for the side plots. I don’t think that’s a problem in those books — they still worked well and I’m still happy with the end result — but writing THIS story has really confirmed for me what I do best as a writer, and what style works well for me. 

One aspect I had a lot of fun with in the writing of this novella is that Ripley sees the world through fabric and fashion. When she’s driving on the road, it stretches out before her like a ribbon. The stars in the sky twinkle like rhinestones to her. The snow on the ground looks like freshly-laundered linen. I really enjoyed doing some research into fabrics and exploring what the world can look like through that lens, and I think it also makes for some pretty prose throughout the story. 

As I mentioned in the previous episode here on the Author Diary Entries podcast, this book is the best book I’ve written to date. I adore all of my books and I’m always proud of what I publish, but I feel that way even more strongly about Love By Design. This is the 10th novella that I’ll have published — it’s interesting to see that it’s taken me 10 books to feel THIS satisfied with one of them!  

What were the specific processes and methods I used for writing, rewriting, and editing Love By Design?

I started by rereading the prequel to this novella, Small Town Stilettos, and made a bunch of notes for what aspects I wanted to build upon in Love By Design. I also read a document I’d written several years back, featuring 7,000 words of various scenes to include in this manuscript, so that reminded me about what I had initially been thinking about doing when I first came up with the idea for Love By Design a few years back. 

Then I did my Tarot spread for the chapter-by-chapter outline for Love By Design (which I share more about in Episode 196 of this Author Diary Entries podcast), and I mapped out in more detail what I wanted to include in each chapter as a result of that, as well as specific tropes to include. 

Once I’d done that, I was able to go back through those 7,000 words that I’d written a few years previously and cull them: I decided to get rid of about a third of it, and the rest that I kept, I knew half of it would likely need heavy rewrites. They were pretty messy in the sense that they were a mishmash of scene snippets, so I took some time to rearrange them into the specific chapters that I thought would make the most sense. 

Next, I mapped out my schedule for writing and editing: I carved out space in my calendar for exactly when I would write which chapters, when I would edit specific chapters, etc. I had it all mapped out for every single day over the course of a couple months. That helped me figure out what other tasks would need to be moved around, and it also gave me a clear picture of what was realistic in terms of writing, editing, and publishing the novella. 

And then I began writing! I wrote the first draft in a linear fashion, chapters 1 - 11 in order. This was really about getting the story on the page, focusing on what the characters wanted me to know and the story they wanted to tell. By the time I’d finished the first draft, I was at just over 24,000 words in total. 

After that, I went back to the beginning and edited it from start to finish! This round of editing was about adding in anything I’d skipped — e.g. In the first draft, there were some sections where I’d written things like “expand on a description of the person here” or “have a conversation about XYZ here.” This is one of the best ways for me to write a fast first draft! Any time that something feels a bit sticky, I just make a note to deal with it later and then keep going. The second draft is very much about filling in those spaces and cleaning things up. 

As I went through that second draft, I went through and flagged anything to delve deeper into. I made a checklist of things to review: e.g. This book is written in first person POV, and Ripley sees the world through fabric and fashion. So one of the things I wanted to check for was, “Is she actively describing the world in that way? Am I incorporating it in a way that adds to the story, rather than making it feel contrived?” Another example is that we discover early on in the book that Logan is an artist, and in my first draft, that was the only time it was mentioned. That felt WRONG, somehow. So I realized that it would be better to make that a more important part of the story, and that was one of the things I built upon during the rewrites. (This actually led to one of the most important observations that Ripley makes at the end of the book! One of my favourite things about the writing process is discovering the ways in which a seemingly small scene we’ve written can pave the way to connect the dots later on.)

An interesting note at this stage of the process: The writing in Love By Design felt quite simple when I was doing the initial edits— which I don’t think is a bad thing, but it was interesting to note that during my first set of edits. Not that I think my writing has become complicated or overly complex over the years, but — in my first pass of this novel — the style of this book really harkened back to my earlier works. I kind of like the simpler writing because it gives me more space to tell the story and BE with the characters. 

After that, I went through my manuscript in full and read it out loud. I zoomed in super big on the computer screen and used the walking pad to help my brain stay very focused. I read the entire book out loud, which helped me to catch awkward sentences that I didn’t notice before; it also made it MUCH more obvious when I overused words, or when there was a typo, or an accidental extra space between words. 

At this stage of the editing process, if I couldn’t figure out how to improve a word or sentence within about 5 seconds, I highlighted it and moved on. I wanted to move through the story fairly quickly when I was reading it out loud so that I could get a good sense of the overall story as I did it. During this time I was also considering general word choice, pacing, character development, descriptions, dialogue.  

After that, I went back through the manuscript (again, from start to finish), and dealt with all of those highlighted words and phrases that I’d marked for myself. I referred to the dictionary and the Chicago Manual of Style a lot around this phase of the process to double-check spelling, word choice, when to use hyphens vs when NOT to use hyphens, proper formatting (for instance, uppercase vs lower case after a colon), etc. 

Canadian English is a fun, cute li’l weirdo hybrid of British English and American English, so for instance I’ll write words like “colour” in the British way with an “ou” rather just an “o,” but I prefer to write words like “organize” in the American way with a “z” rather than an “s.” Other Canadians might have different preferences than me; we have a lot of variations to our words depending on personal preference! As a general rule, I default to my copy of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, BUT mine is from 2004. So it’s probably a bit outdated at this point! Same with my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style — it’s from 2010. (Fun fact, I used to work as a freelance editor, which is why I have the Chicago Manual of Style in the first place.) And in some instances, I just have my own preferred style that doesn’t fit into an official style guide, in which case I go with that! To me it’s more important about being consistent within the same book, rather than following a particular official style guide.

For my next stage of the writing and editing process, I added text messages in between each chapter. This is a cute feature that I included in the prequel to Love By Design, so I added it in again — these provide a rich extra layer of intimacy connecting the reader to the characters, and I love how they turned out! It was fun to play with which characters should be texting between which chapters, what they should be discussing, how those moments could further the story and help the reader get to see another side of the characters, and so on. 

Throughout this process, I kept a quick bullet-point list indicating who the text messages were between at the end of each chapter, so I could confirm that it all made sense and that I was giving all of the characters the amount of page time they deserved. 

After that, I went through another checklist of edits to do that I’d made while I’d read the book out loud. Sometimes, highlighting a phrase wasn’t enough; I might get an idea or a thought to expand upon, so in that case, I added it to an editing checklist. So at this point, I dealt with that list. This was mostly more minor details, like “this character should mention XYZ at this point,” or “remember to do a callback to this thing from Chapter 3 somewhere around Chapters 7 - 9.”

Then, I once again reviewed the prequel, Small Town Stilettos, to check for consistency. For example, the layout of the town is described in detail in Small Town Stilettos, so I wanted to make sure I hadn’t messed anything up. (And in fact, I had! I said that the church was beside the gas station in one book and across from the gas station in the other book. So that was a very easy fix, and I’m glad I re-read Small Town Stilettos to confirm those types of details.)

Another thing that happens in Love By Design is that the power goes out and the generator doesn’t kick in, BUT in Small Town Stilettos, I made a point of noting that the love interest has a backup generator, because he’s a very prepared kind of person. So when I saw that during this reread of Small Town Stilettos, it gave me the idea to mention in Love By Design how the love interest gave his backup generator to a prominent character from the previous book. This was great, because a) it ensured continuity between the two books, b) it references a character from the first book (which is a fun Easter egg for readers who read the previous book in the duology), and c) it reinforces important attributes about Logan, the love interest, in that he’s not only a very prepared person but he’s also always taking care of other people and looking out for them; he’s generous with helping people out.

And all of that was achieved within the space of one or two sentences in Love By Design. Those kinds of moments are some of my FAVOURITES, as an author!

Next, I once more read each chapter out loud — the entire manuscript from start to finish. This time, I was checking for 3 things: first, awkward sentences, typos, weird word choice, etc, second, physicality of the scene (how are the characters positioned and what movements do they make?), and third, expressions in the scene (what are they doing with their faces?). In this case, I read a single chapter out loud from start to finish, and then I went back and scanned through the chapter again (not out loud), this time ONLY looking at the physical action; after that, I went back through that same chapter from start to finish and this time scanned it ONLY for expressions. Once I’d done those three things in the chapter, I let myself move on to the next chapter to do the same thing for it. 

This was VERY helpful, because at one point I discovered that Ripley picked up the same bag twice in a scene. A glitch in the Matrix! Looking for expressions also helped me to identify when I said someone looked sad, rather than expressing HOW they looked sad, so I was able to clean up those areas. And also, by looking at the expressions, I could see that the same person did some variation of grinning five times in two minutes, so that gave me a chance to see where I needed to mix things up and not rely on one type of expression to convey their mood or attitude.

After I did that, the next round of edits was another list that I created as I’d gone through the previous chapter by chapter set of edits: I wanted to check to see, “is there too much winking? Do their faces and eyes light up too many times?”, that kind of thing. This round of edits was mostly me doing a search for typically overused words, and then dealing with all of them. For example, I’d search how many times I wrote “begin/began/start,” or “certain/sure,” or “gaze,” or “even,” “realize,” “maybe,” “just,” “sudden,” “slow,” etc. I currently have 57 words on that list! I did a search for all of them, and I removed or replaced them as needed. This was a great visual to see exactly where I was overusing a word multiple times in quick succession. 

This is a list that I started years ago as a reference for my novellas, so some of those words are no longer words that I overuse, but I still like to keep them in the list to make sure I don’t resort to them again in the future. I add more words to that list with every book that I write, when I notice new words are being overused in a particular manuscript. It’s such a helpful tool! And I will also note that the way that I figure out when I’ve overused a word is typically just through the process of doing all of these rounds of writing and reading and revising — sometimes I’ll happen to notice that a word appears three times on a page, or I’ll think to myself, “Huh, I feel like I’ve already used that turn of phrase a couple times,” and that flags it for me. If I notice it as a reader, that’s a sign that I’ve overused a word.

At this stage of the process I also looked up the letters “ly” to identify adverbs in the manuscript, and I assessed what to keep vs get rid of vs what to replace with something stronger. I love my adverbs, so this is a necessary checkpoint! I also keep a good chunk of adverbs, BUT by doing the search, it helps me to more clearly see where I’ve gone overboard with them, which ones I’m using more than others, and which ones don’t need to be there at all and would be way stronger with a different word or phrasing of that sentence. I also did a search for the word “look” and replaced some of those with WHAT the person was looking at, or HOW they were looking. 

After that: I did a quick Spell Check for any errors, uploaded the manuscript to my Draft2Digital book platform so that it was properly formatted, and then I added that to my Kobo so that I could read the book in the exact same format as it’ll be when a reader is reading it. I read the entire book from start to finish on my Kobo, and edited a bunch on the computer document as I went — sometimes for awkward sentences, but more often than not it was about making stronger word choices. Especially for words like “got” or “put” or “stood” or “walked.” Those were the major ones I noticed at THIS stage of the editing process — I was able to more easily see what words would work better in those sentences. I think this was partly because sometimes when I’m reading a book for pleasure, I’ll notice those things and think to myself, “ooh, it would’ve been stronger if the author used this other word here,” so my eye can catch that more easily on my Kobo than when it’s a computer document. 

And that’s all the writing and editing I’ve done so far! I’ve let the manuscript rest for the past couple weeks and then I’ll do one more proofread of it this week, again on my Kobo. If I only find a couple small changes to make (e.g. typos), then that will be it. If I notice more than just a couple, then I’ll do another pass of it after that — My general rule of thumb is that if I’m still noticing typos, then there are still more that I’m missing. If I get to the point where I’m reading through the final draft and only find one or two typos in the entire manuscript, then it’s probably good to publish!

I was absolutely delighted with how the book read on my Kobo; I truly believe that this is the best book I’ve written so far, and so it was especially beautiful to feel that way about it, even though I did a lot of minor tweaks and edits to that draft! I loved that I was thinking to myself, “If this was published the way it is right now, it would still be a very solid book… and I’m making it even better with these minor changes.”

So that was the writing and editing process! How long did all of this take me to do? Here’s an overview of the amount of time it took me for writing and editing this novella…

I logged 2 hours in March, 9 hours in May, and then 24 hours in June and 30 hours in July. Honestly I was not expecting that 65 hours would be the total amount! Not that it feels unreasonable at all; that seems very normal, especially given that although I CAN write much faster, on average I typically write 1,000 words/hour for a book because I’m thinking through things and often pause to tweak. With that in mind, Love By Design is a 35,000 word novella, so we can assume approximately 35 hours just to write all of those words. Another 30 hours to do rewrites and edits makes a lot of sense. 

ALSO: As I mentioned earlier, when I started the manuscript, I already had 7,000 words that I’d written a couple years ago; I scrapped about a third of it and reworked another third (the last third was actually pretty solid). Given that I also went through to review those 7,000 words, made the decisions of what to keep vs scrap vs revise, and then had to reorganize those scenes to figure out where they should fit into my chapter outline — and all of THAT time was logged — I suspect the actual hours to write those 7,000 words would’ve been maybe 4 extra? I didn’t go back a few years ago to find out how many hours it actually took me. 

Let’s round up to 70 hours, give or take another couple hours. 

On top of that, I also had to put time into the “publishing” aspect of this book — I separate that out from the writing and editing. The “publishing” side of things involves tasks like writing the book blurb, doing keyword research and identifying tropes, creating the playlist for the book, planning the cover art and communications with my cover designer, uploading the manuscript to book platform sites, etc. So far that’s taken 7 hours.

I mentioned earlier that I mapped out my entire schedule for exactly when I was going to write this chapter vs edit that chapter. These types of plans are always an organic, living set of plans. I do not follow them to a tee, BECAUSE I trust myself and I know from experience that even when I move tasks to different days, I’ll still be able to meet deadlines. I stuck pretty closely to the plan, but I also gave myself permission to move around tasks as needed. It was more that the order of operations stayed the same, and sometimes I’d just move a task a day later or a day earlier etc depending on my brainspace or other activities I had going on or whether a given task took longer or shorter than I expected. 

As I mentioned, I will be doing one more FINAL proofread of this book before publishing day, one last pass to check for typos, and then I’ll finish uploading the book to all publishing sites. So let’s anticipate maybe another 4 hours for the “writing and editing” side of things, and another 4 hours for the “publishing” side of things… That’ll bring us to 85 hours in total to plan, write, edit, and publish this book, assuming that I don’t need to do a couple more rounds of proofreads after that. If we want to add buffer time and account for extra rounds of proofreads, we could say that it might be closer to 90 or 95 hours in total for the writing, editing, and publishing of this book.

Sidebar: That does NOT include any marketing for the book. That’s a whole other beast! Any social media marketing, email marketing, this podcast, etc, is all under a totally different set of time tracking, which I’m not going to get into for our purposes today. 

(Speaking of marketing, a reminder that you can pre-order this novella, Love By Design, at your favourite e-bookstore, or visit SaganMorrow.com/books! Link is in the show notes.)

Overall, I primarily worked on this book over the course of two months — June and July. I did 2 hours of prep in March, 30 minutes in April, 9 hours in May, 25 hours in June, and 34.5 hours in July. That was 71 hours over the course of, really, 8 weeks. (Especially because I finished all of this on July 21, so that was actually only 3 weeks in July!) 

THAT IS INCREDIBLY COOL. I haven’t worked on a book this intensely since the first book I published in the Polyamorous Passions series (but that novella was only 23,000 words long, not 35,000 words, and I also did not have rigorous systems in place for all of my many rounds of edits. I still had multiple rounds of edits, but my processes were not as robust as they are now).

I love having this hard evidence that it is very doable for me to write and edit and publish a novella within the space of 2 months. Now, this is also a bit different during the summer months when my spouse goes away for stretches at a time to do fieldwork, because that means I can work kind of weird hours on my books when inspiration strikes — BUT, something I think is super cool about this is that I’ve still been maintaining the rest of my business throughout this process, AND I also prepared for and performed in 4 different burlesque shows in the middle of this experience. So it’s just been very lovely to see how the book was integrating honestly pretty seamlessly into the rest of my life. 

Writing books is so ENERGIZING to me. As someone who is very much a proponent of anti-hustle productivity, and someone who has really fine-tuned the art of working efficiently without burning out, I can get a full day’s worth of work completed in the space of 4 hours. I typically “power down” by the time I hit Hour 5 in a given day. Four hours is generally my sweet spot. But there were multiple days throughout the process of working on Love By Design when I was able to just keep GOING with writing and editing, without losing steam… and it also increased my energetic capacity to do OTHER tasks, too. I had a 10-hour day when I did that last round of proofreading. That is not the norm for me, at all! I love that book writing gives me so much energy that it just spurs me on and increases my bandwidth like that. Working on my books is MAGIC!

There you have it — that’s a wrap on today’s episode! If you found this helpful and interesting, share this episode with your friends and community on Instagram or Threads and tag me, @Saganlives, so I can repost it. 

And if you are enjoying the Author Diary Entries podcast, please take 2 minutes to rate and review it on your favourite podcast platform — it means so, so much to me when you do that.

Thanks so much — I appreciate you!

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Sagan Morrow

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