Draft Two is Done!
now to do it again... and other 2025 things...
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
-G.K. Chesterton
Hi friend! It’s been a while.
The end of 2024 was an utter whirlwhind for me, and thus did I disappear briefly from the face of the earth. Or, well, the face of Substack, which is obviously the same thing :)
Anyway. The end of the year was filled with many good things, a few trying things, and, as promised, a finished draft two of The Book. (!!!)
I have missed this though, so I’m quite happy to be back. I hope you all had a blessed and refreshing Christmas season and that your 2025 is off to a good start — even if it does require exulting in some kind of monotony like Chesterton describes above. I know it does for me, and so the notion of finding the joy in “do it again” has been one I have very much needed as of late.
It’s been a slow start to the year overall. A time to reset after a whirlwind, a time to look forward to what comes next. I’ve been reading and writing and baking cookies and playing around with an increasingly complicated (but very satisfying, helpful, and aesthetically pleasing) Notion setup. So… lots of good things!
I have of course been considering Substack in the midst of my absence, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I very much desire it to be a simple thing. Now, I’m far from the only person online who speaks about the need to limit time online in the name of honoring life in its embodied reality, but needing to echo the point does not make it trite or untrue. I simply won’t go into it in great detail.
Long story short though. Writing is but a part of life, and the greater part of my writing will always be my novels in progress. Substack needs to be a simple thing that grows out of what I am already doing as a wife and a mother, as a writer and an artist, and as a daughter of God. Lest it tries to crowd those things out, as all social media ever tries to do.
And so, in 2025, you can expect to hear from me once a month.
Aiming for weekly newsletters (like I briefly attempted last summer and then burned out) brings with it too great a temptation to perform being a Catholic mother and artist, rather than simply letting myself be one. The frequency keeps the question of "how am I going to present this?” far closer to the front of my mind than it should be.
Monthly, however, I take a day or two at the end of the month to look back and share a few things I loved about it, particularly in the creative realm. That sounds delightful to me, and I hope it will be encouraging to you in turn :)
All that being said, let’s get started!
Notes from the Writing Desk
Well, here’s the first big piece of news that isn’t really even news because I said it already.
I finished draft two of my novel!
That makes two complete drafts in two years, and while it was a push at the end as it tends to be, it is such a joy to be able to say that.
Draft two is, in truth, too big. It is 364k words in the final count, or somewhere in the realm of 1,000 pages, depending on typesetting.
That is a lot.
It is not, in absolute terms, too long. I have an undying love for long stories, to the point where I consider any book less than 150k words to be quite short, possibly very good, but short. My two favorite books are The Brothers Karamazov and The Lord of the Rings, both of which are solidly in that 350-500k word range. The trouble is, those are complete stories.1 Now having spent that same stretch of time on simply the first volume of a five book series, I think I finally understand why people typically advise against this length.
There is so often a more efficient, more impactful way to tell the same story.
My setup right now is incredibly over-complicated. Its middle is bloated and confusing. Thankfully, I quite love the back half, but it just takes so long to reach it! When I look at this draft, I see a core and finale that I love so dearly, completely and utterly burdened by the meandering path it takes to get there.
The book kind of needs to be gutted to make it work.
Now. While that might sound somewhat harsh as a self-evaluation, very different from what I said one year ago when I finished draft one, I still actually feel very good both about the fact that I have grown enough in skill as a writer to recognize these kinds of problems AND about where the book itself stands right now.
Because it’s a work in progress.
It’s just draft two.
A fundamental part of the process of writing is discovering the underdeveloped, messy, and/or possibly incoherent ideas that are bogging your story down. Because they’re there. No doubt. None of us are immune. We write to learn what our story does and doesn’t really need, what we thought it needed versus what it actually really needs. It is through learning these things that we gain the skill necessary to create something close to whatever that glorious vision in our imagination is.
The greatest gift that comes from writing a lot, nearly daily nowadays, is that now… the more I write, the less attached I am to any one thing I write. Being able to just haphazardly create, knowing that everything that goes onto the page is raw material I can reshape and refine into something better… is incredibly freeing. Embracing creativity as an incredibly iterative process, where the idea of making something over and over again becomes more an opportunity than a burden,2 has utterly changed the game for me. The process of making a story exist is great, but it’s nothing in comparison to the thrill of making it good.
And so now… it’s time for me to approach the next iteration of The Book!
In the interest of doing this effectively, I’ve been taking the first two months of the year to thoroughly plan out draft three before I even touch it. I’ve done some straightforward outlining of course, but I’m going a lot deeper than I have in the past this time.
Character interviews have helped me discover totally new angles on characters I thought I understood, bringing them to life in totally different ways that make me love them so much. Certain worldbuilding issues have at long last become glaring enough to make me address them, which has given me so much more to work with in terms of the nuances of plots and schemes and social dynamics. I’ve also opted to shorten the book’s timeline to cut bloat, up tension, and get to the really good stuff more quickly.
I have had to kill a few darlings along the way, because I very much feel like a new story has been coming to life within the body of the old one. Forgive the morbid metaphor. Making a lot of material changes to a story does require a lot of letting go, but it has all been in the name of honoring the heart of this thing so much better than I was able to five years ago.3
It has very much been worth it.
Everything feels so much richer from a character and world perspective, and the plot is unfolding so much more smoothly. I am incredibly excited to head into draft three (possibly before February is out but it’s looking more like early March at this point) and I’m looking forward to giving you some glimpses of the journey along the way :)
Glimpses from the Sketchbook
Truly, one of the best decisions I made last year was to spend more time working on my art. Picking up a pencil and sketching in the margins of my notebooks has long been a mainstay in my life and something I wanted to improve in. To take that and refine it has been such an awesome experience, both in that it is satisfying to improve one’s skills and because I’ve discovered how much I love to bring characters to life visually. I also find it much easier to share my art with others than my writing, making it a great preliminary way to bring people into this world I am not quite ready to share in full.
I’ve definitely stuck largely to my comfort zone of faces and people in the past couple of months, but I’ve felt more and more of an improvement all the same. Portrait sketches now take me so little time to pull together, and while real expressiveness remains beyond me, especially when working in color like below, we’re getting there. Playing around with expression is probably a good challenge for the next month, I’ll let you know if it happens :)
This last one was an especially fun experiment given that it was done entirely in colored pencil with no underlying sketch. I felt comfortable enough with drawing a simple face (especially these three faces in particular) that I was able to lean entirely into the process of layering color without having the chance to erase anything. I have a few quibbles with it, but I’m quite happy overall. It’s also just very fun to be a beginner in something, when even simple experiments teach you lots of new things.
You can’t wait to just… do it again :)
Before I move on though, I do want to share two more pieces of art that are not mine exactly. They are my characters, but the art itself was done by the lovely
. I had the good fortune of getting to know Jess last year through the absolutely fantastic Inkwells and Anvils Discord Server, which I would heartily recommend to any Catholics or Christians looking for support and friendship in their creative endeavors. It’s really great, end plug.Anyway, one day this past December, Jess offered to do sketches of people’s characters and she made not one but two illustrations of two characters of mine that have taken over more and more of Book One with every iteration. I love them so much. I’m obsessed with the second one especially. Go subscribe to
, she’s lovely!!
Favorites from the Bookshelf
And to wrap things up today, let’s turn to some of my favorite books as of late, one fiction read and one nonfiction read.
That Which Sings by
While not exactly for the faint of heart, That Which Sings was without question one of the best books I read in 2024. It is the story of Nes Colquhoun, a teenage girl trapped in a miserable, centuries-old family pact with the fae. They are just waiting for the chance to kill her or worse, and when they take the uncle who raised her in her stead, she decides to fight to get him back. It is a gorgeous, viscerally written book, heart-breaking and hopeful at the same time. A beautiful ode to the darker side of fairy tales, it will make you contemplate the ethics of revenge, the spiraling nature of rage and grief, and what makes one a monster. You may also, as I did, fall in love with Fin Colquhoun, Nes’ uncle, in approximately three pages flat, making everything that happens so, so much worse :)
Anyway, read That Which Sings! Support an up-and-coming indie author and her awesome book — she is on Substack too if you are interested.
He Leadeth Me by Servant of God Walter Ciszek
I’m not even going to try to summarize this one actually. There’s too much I could say. I’m simply going to leave you with a quote from this book that has utterly reshaped my understanding of God and how He works in this world for the better. That should get the point across far better than any pitch of mine.
Somehow, that day, I imagined I must know how Saint Peter felt when he had survived his denials and been restored to Christ’s friendship…. I doubt very much that Peter ever again boasted that he would never desert the Lord even if all others deserted him…. For just as surely as man begins to trust in his own abilities, so surely has he taken the first step on the road to ultimate failure. And the greatest grace God can give such a man is to send him a trial he cannot bear with his own powers—and then sustain him with his grace so he may endure to the end and be saved.
Read it.
That’s all I’ve got for today.
Thank you all again for reading as always. It really is a delight to be back. I look forward to appearing in your inbox again in March hopefully with another writing, art, and reading update, and I hope the latter part of winter treats you well until then. (I know I’m holding out for more snow personally).
In any case, God bless you, I’ll be praying for you, and I’ll write you again soon.
-Jess
Yes, Bros K was going to have a sequel, and, yes, Lord of the Rings has other connected stories. But they are satisfying as standalone works.
Thus that Chesterton quote up there.
Frankly, even six months ago. Your capacity for writing can shift so much in an evidently short window of time when you show up nearly every day.
Thank you for the update on your projects -- so exciting that draft 2 is complete. :D It's always inspiring to hear from other creatives (especially authors) that are out there crushing words and getting stuff done amid the busyness of life. And that Chesterton quote was SUPERB.
Ooh, nicely done! This was a nice read. Looking forward to the completion of the book.