Behind the Tabs: 26 Chapters Down & The Chaos Below

Hello again, everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to share and celebrate a major milestone with you all. If you follow my Instagram (and soon-to-be TikTok), you might have seen the Reel I just posted teasing my current progress sidebar. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend taking a look, because today's blog is all about the reality behind that screen scroll!

I really wanted to give you an up-close look at what this journey has actually been like. Looking at those tabs, I feel incredibly proud to showcase a sneak peek of the work I’ve been pouring myself into for the last six—going on seven—months since I first started writing this story.

As you saw in the video, I have officially sorted through twenty-six chapters! What you might not know is that those twenty-six chapters actually started as just four massive, chunky blocks of outlined text. I've managed to break them all down, rearrange them, and lock them into place. Now, as I mentioned in the video, those twenty-six chapters still need plenty of love and a lot of deep editing, but getting them to this point is a massive victory.

My method right now is pretty straightforward: I go straight down the line, breaking up those massive text chunks into digestible, fast-paced chapters. Because I already have the entire book outlined from start to finish, I can focus on editing, pulling things out, or weaving new elements in to make sure everything serves the bigger picture. My mindset through this whole process has been go, go, go—write now, edit seriously later. I can always fix it in the next pass.

But the real challenge is what lies beneath.

Those remaining unnumbered chunks at the bottom of the document—the six sections sitting under my finished twenty-six chapters—are absolutely massive. Some of them span one hundred to two hundred pages of raw ideas just on their own! It is a serious process to sit there and decide what stays, what goes, how to bridge the gaps, and where to split the chapters.

I won't lie to you: sometimes making the executive decision to cut a scene or an idea out of the book is incredibly tough. The attachment to the words is real! I know it’s a universal problem for authors, but experiencing it firsthand is a whole different beast.

I still have a high mountain to climb and a lot of chaos left to sort through. This project is constantly teaching me patience, but it’s a journey I am genuinely happy to be on—and one I am so incredibly grateful to share with all of you.

Thank you for being here for the grind. The climb continues!