Draft Two, Take Two
On what to call it and how I got here
Hello friends 👋🏾,
I’ve been saying yes to things again. 2025 was my year of “no,” and honestly, that may have to be an every odd-numbered year thing. But this year, I’m doing stuff. (Not coincidentally, I’ve been releasing new books on even-numbered years for nearly a decade, which usually coincides with packing my calendar tighter than a carry-on bag).
However, I genuinely like teaching and presenting workshops. I’ve always been a sucker for a writing class, and it feels good to give back in this way. Anyway, please consider checking out these upcoming events:
June 17, 2026, 7pm ET - The Business of Publishing: Indie vs. Traditional (online)
Wondering whether you should self-publish your book or try to go with a traditional publisher?
I’ll be participating in a candid discussion with best-selling indie author, Ines Johnson and author & founder of Virtuous Con, Cerece Rennie Murphy, to discuss the ins and outs of what it takes to operate successfully in both realms from a financial and personal perspective.
The workshop is FREE to attend, so click here to register. Hope to see you there!
June 27, 2026 - Storybeast’s Build Your Author Empire (online)
Build Your Author Empire is a full-day virtual workshop perfect for writers ready to level up their author business practices or create a roadmap for those starting their author journeys.
I will be teaching two workshops: “The Authorpreneur Path” and “The Author Funnel: Turning Strangers into Superfans on Autopilot” alongside publishing luminaries like Jane Friedman and Ken Liu.
Register for this live online event.
July 22-25, 2026 - Expand Summit (online)
This free, online summit is for creators, authors, educators, experts, and creative business owners who want their work to travel farther.
My workshop is: “Doubling Down on Being Human: Building a Distinctive and Authentic Writing Voice.”
Register for the summit for free.
July 29, 2026, 1pm - 2:30pm ET - “Writing from Your Why” workshop (online)
In a publishing landscape with AI-generated content flowing onto retailers, distinguishing ourselves as artists is more important than ever. To write stories that stand out on crowded bookshelves requires demonstrating our humanity more than ever before.
Join me for this interactive workshop, hosted by Jane Friedman, where you’ll identify how to stand out from the crowd and find readers who love your unique voice.
Register now for early-bird pricing!
August 22, 2026 - Fiction Makers Conference (in-person - Baltimore, MD)
Come to Charm City for a one-day conference focused completely on writing craft. Learn practical techniques for building immersive worlds, writing scenes that feel cinematic, creating powerful emotional moments, developing meaningful themes, and even adapting your novel for the screen.
My workshop is “Worldbuilding for Any Genre.”
Register now; space is limited.
Drafting again…
It’s been a tough week, so I didn’t podcast today, but if I had, I would have talked about draft two, take two.
See, I started draft two of my current work in progress a few months ago. I got about 12,000 words in, showed some of that to my agent, and then had to regroup when he had Notes.
They were good Notes. Although, like all Notes, they stung a bit. When I finally get to the point where I’m ready to show someone part of my manuscript, I’m in one of two mind states: A) this is perfection, and I have won writing! Or B) I’m not sure what’s happening here, and I need help.
I, of course, was in camp A when I sent it to my agent, and he gently informed me I was really in the land of B.
Three months later, I’m drafting again. But I don’t feel like this is draft three. I’m still calling it draft two, even though I’m starting again from the beginning.
Over those three months, I made some pretty big changes to my main character’s motivation and backstory to address my agent’s concerns. I’ve also changed the manuscript from third person to first person, which is still an evolving decision, but one that I feel pretty comfortable with at this stage in the draft. This had nothing to do with my agent. It was just as I sat with the story more and thought about how I wanted it to feel and what the reader experience should be, I sensed that this needed to be in first person.
The POV shift allows me to sink deeper into the characters and hopefully create a unique and compelling voice. The same can certainly be done in third person. But aside from genre considerations, for me, point of view is mostly a vibe.
As of yesterday, I’m about 8,300 words in, so not too far off from where I was before, and feeling really good about it, although it is going extremely slowly.
To get here I had to let the feedback sink in, take a look at what I had planned to do and how to address the changes, re-plot everything, revisit the characters, dive deeper into them, do full character profiles for who I think are going to be the three POV characters. I also delved deeper into the magic system, the rules, and the backstory. Finally, I told myself the story about a dozen times until I got to another clean synopsis.
It’s never perfect, and I second-guess myself all the time. At the same time, I feel good about this, so it’s sort of the contradictory, push-pull nature of creative work.
So is it draft two or draft three? Here’s how I think about it: it’s not draft three because I didn’t finish draft two. 12,000 words do not a draft make for me. So I’ll call it 2B for now and chalk it up to the messy nomenclature of versions. I’ve also tried versioning my drafts like software. That’s actually how I’ve been numbering my synopses. So right now we’re on Synopsis 2.5. Maybe this is draft 2.5 as well.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. Naming files in a logical way helps get me in the right frame of mind, but that’s probably mostly a me thing. My task now is to get to the end of the story and polish it up before once again showing it to my agent, and hopefully it will be ready to move to the next step.
📣 Your turn: How do you number your drafts? Do you start over from page one and count it as a new version, or is it still the same draft until you type “The End”? (Does anyone actually type “The End”? Let me know how you name the messy in-between stages in the comments. I’d love to know I’m not the only one keeping a spreadsheet of synopsis version numbers.
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I'm so curious about other folk's drafting systems as well!
Once I get past the first two drafts, which are focused heavily on just getting words on the page, I often have passes where I'm not touching every scene and am focusing on, say, improving the group dynamics or beefing up a haunting subplot, and once I work through all of the relevant changes, I consider that draft done.
As I get closer to the finish line and want to ensure every scene sees improvements (and the manuscript is working as a whole), I consider a full chapter-one-to-the-end sweep as a single draft. Every once in a while, if I'm feeling really burnt out, I'll stop wherever I'm at and give myself the clean-slate feeling of a new draft.
Thank you! Lately I've been naming drafts with the current season (Summer 2026, for example) rather than using numbers. Somehow it frees me up in a way an ever-increasing draft number would not. For me, the most important value here is version control--using a system that will allow me to recover something from a previous draft should the need arise.