I’ve recently added a new “Current Progress” chart to the site, but as I created it, I realized that most people probably don’t know that writing the book is really only the start of the arduous journey.

Therefore, I present to you, the key to what my percentages mean:

The first 60% = putting the story to paper (This is the easy part, believe it or not).

1% – 10% (Outline) is when I’ve got the ideas, and I’m putting together the story’s timeline, building chapters, and coming up with a general outline for the plot.

11% – 35% (Detail) is when I’m adding in details, coming up with plot specifics, maybe coordinating how a character gets from point A to point B, giving them some good dialogue, and all that kind of stuff.

36% – 60% (Elaborate) is the part where I flesh everything out, taking the story from some scenes and conversations, and expanding it into an actual, interwoven story, with descriptions and detail.

By this point, I’ve gone over the story several dozen times, creating something that has all of my ideas written down, never to be forgotten.

Then comes the hard part.

61% – 75% (Star Removal) As I type, there are a few things I skip over to keep consistency through the story. If Jo’s on a rant and I need her to be fighting at the same time, I might type “*insert hand to hand fight here,” or “*add a clever analogy here,” so I can keep my train of thought through the scene, then later, control+F an asterisk to easily find things still in need of attention. I usually end up with 5-20 of these per chapter, meaning a fair amount of touching up once I’ve done the research for each of these little flags.

76% – 85% (Preliminary Read) The next step is reading through the whole story, start to finish, on my laptop. I fix a LOT of little mistakes, and some big mistakes, and make my thoughts more reader-friendly, basically. After this step, I’ve read the whole book probably fifty times.

86% – 95% (Formatting Read) I format the story, send it to my Kindle, then read the whole thing as if it’s someone else’s book. I’ll read aloud, to help find the mistakes, and do everything I can to fix all the little inconsistencies and grammar mistakes I might have missed on my previous read-throughs, and yet…

95% – 100% (Final Read) I re-read it as if it’s someone else’s book – again – and find a whole new slough of mistakes I didn’t catch on the first several-dozen reads. By this point, I’m so sick of my own story that it’s very difficult to focus on it, and even though it’s the last five percent, this part often takes longer than any other part of the whole process.

From here, it’s a few advanced reader copies, a few more edits I missed, and then dropping to Amazon – all of which are processes in and of themselves – before I start the 30-day countdown.

So, there you have it! Now, when you look at my “Current Progress” stuff, you’ll have a much better idea of what I actually mean when I say I’m 96% done with Villainous Vengeance.

TLDR: Writing a book is only half the battle, and I’m struggling with dopamine loss by the time I get to the end of every book’s editing.