On the Editorial Process

Writing a 300,000-word novel is one thing. Editing it is another entirely.

After the first draft was complete, I faced a problem every writer knows: you stop seeing your own mistakes. After the hundredth read-through, your eye slides over the same crutch phrases, the same pacing lulls, the same structural weaknesses. You need an editor—someone who reads your work with fresh, demanding eyes and tells you what isn't working.

The editorial revision of this manuscript was aided by Galleys, an AI editorial framework I developed alongside this project.

What Galleys Does

Galleys doesn't write prose. It reads like a demanding editor: identifying structural weaknesses, pacing issues, prose pattern repetition, and over-explanation that a human eye might miss. It flags problems. The writer fixes them.

Think of it as a tireless first reader who never gets bored, never gets polite, and never forgets that you used the same simile construction fourteen chapters ago.

What It Did for This Book

Galleys helped shape this manuscript through multiple revision passes over the course of several months:

• Cut over 80,000 words of flab from a 388k-word first draft
• Merged redundant chapters and tightened structural pacing
• Identified and eliminated prose tics—repeated phrases, simile stacking, adverb-heavy dialogue tags
• Flagged every instance of show-then-tell (writing a vivid image, then explaining what it means)
• Enforced manuscript-wide pattern ceilings to prevent unconscious repetition
• Expanded scenes that needed room to breathe—adding action and dialogue where the prose had become too interior
• Ran continuity checks against the existing two novels to catch contradictions

The result: a 388k-word first draft became a 301k-word finished manuscript. Tighter, faster, and more faithful to the voice of the series.

For Writers