Crafts Against the Current // 2

How a first chapter evolved from pitch to published.

I am nosy about other author’s editorial processes so I thought I would share a little about mine by showing you the extract that we sold the series on, how I wrote the same scene in the first draft, and how it ended up in the final version. Below you can read a bit about how and why it evolved with some of the notes my editor gave me, and why I made the various decisions that I did! There’s a little more about how we sold the series in Crafts Against the Current #1 but essentially it was with a proposal, the prologue (which barely changed hence not using it for this) and “chapter one” which became chapter two. So to begin, here’s what I wrote in my proposal - this was written pretty quickly due to various things going on in the submission process to give a flavour of the book. I was asked for “a single page document on Whetherwhy if that’s something you could put together? Just short synopsis/pitch kind of thing, maybe with the opening paragraph or the like” by my editor (it is obviously a rather different process selling more books to your existing publisher than being a debut on submission). The pitch itself is for a future post, if that’s of interest, but I’m going to focus on the sample here. So this is what went to my publisher almost two years ago to the day:

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