My Writing Routine (and history)

The fun thing about being an author is that there is no "right" or "wrong" way to write a book. You just need to figure out what your flow is for writing. Maybe you're someone who...

-Needs to write it in chronological order from start to finish

-Panster, someone who writes by the seat of their pants and has no idea where the story will take them next

-Writes all the main ideas and comes back later to fill in the rest

-Needs to write out an outline and plan in depth what is going to occur in the book

-Write the last chapter first, and then come back to the beginning

There's definitely more ways than what I listed above, and here's what I can tell you. I tried all the ones above while figuring out my personal writing routine, and the one that worked best for me was writing out an in-depth outline, including every chapter. What's crazy is that while I was in school, I rolled my eyes constantly at needing to do outlines for a paper, and yet, here I am using them for my books.

Initially, when I wrote A Kingdom of Promises and Lies (AKOPAL), I wrote all the main ideas I needed to get out of my head first. Every major event, yup, I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget it. Somewhere, on a pinterest pin quote, I'd read "write the scene you are most excited for, even if it's at the end of the book, otherwise when you finally get there you may not be as excited to write it" I'm paraphrasing from memory, but I'm like 'okay, that makes sense! let's do it!' Obviously, it worked because you now get to read about Mina's story, but there were some struggles. First off, it was my debut novel, so I'll give it some grace there because I was still figuring things out - I'd attempted to write books before but never got to the finish line, always becoming stuck before the halfway mark.

Here's where my biggest problems came with this tactic. I wrote the scenes and sometimes I knew how I'd bridge them together, but other times, I'd sit there and go "now what? How do I get from point A to point B?" It sounds easy, because I wield the pen, but in reality, some characters just don't listen (I'll get into that in another blog post; the characters in a book definitely do their own thing) or the writing comes off jarring. There was a lot of pansting happening in this book. A Kingdom of Promises and Lies took me less than a year to write, but I definitely felt I struggled while figuring out my writing routine. I had to remind myself constantly that I'm still finding my flow, it's okay to stumble along the way.

Next up was Kierian, here I attempted a bit of a "loose" outline while once again kinda writing those major scenes. Instead of wanting to piece everything together, I tried to write a bit more chronologically while still having some pantsing occurring. By this point, I'd started reading a few writing help books that other authors I looked up to recommended in some posts. I'll list all the books I have currently read below.

Kierian took me less time to write than my debut. I started writing his book in February 2024 and published it in September 2024. I'm going to put this here: being an author is a marathon, not a sprint. I only have 3 published books under my belt, and just because I knocked out a book within 7 months from writing to publishing, doesn't mean that will always be the case. Kierian's book was loud in my head and I was giddy to write it. Life at the time was flowing well enough for me to make this happen.

A Queendom of Heartbreak and Deceit (AQOHAD), I'll be frank, I love this book. I love Serenity and all that happens within her story, but I was a complete mess while writing it. I started writing her in April 2024, put her aside for Kierian, picked her back up in July 2024, put her aside for Kierian again, wrote a novella for a winter anthology and then finally put my focus back to her. A Queendom of Heartbreak and Deceit truly didn't have my 100% focus like the previous two books did. While writing her, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer and passed away a month before her release. It really was a difficult time and even now as I sit here, I don't know how I was able to make it all happen, but somehow I did?

I panstered hard in Serenity's book. I attempted an outline again like Kierian's, and I think I rewrote it 3-5 times for AQOHAD. One of those plot changes had caused me to rewrite the whole first portion twice, cause I realized an error I had made and then a change in plans. If you've read the book, initially, Serenity's 2 brothers were going to be married, then I realized I wanted them unwed so I could write their books later. I had to scrap out everything about their wives in that rewrite. I think I nixed out over 10,0000 words in chunks because stuff wasn't adding up, scenes needed to be changed. I probably put more work into AQOHAD then I had actually AKOPAL.

Thankfully, when I was writing AKOPAL, I was already laying the groundwork for part 2 of AQOHAD. So, all I needed to do was reread AKOPAL to line up events, attire and actions for Serenity. By this point, I'd read more writing help books, and I had a very, very solid plan for

how I was going to tackle Tennyson, book 2 of the FaeVille series.

I'm currently still working on this cover

Tennyson's book, which currently isn't published. I sat down and wrote the most in-depth, detailed outline of my life. I wrote it down to the bullet point of what would occur in each and every chapter. I started that outline on June 6, 2025, and finished draft 1 on July 24, 2025. Which is crazy, but I also told myself I was on a deadline to finish draft one by the end of the day on July 31st.

Deadlines. I didn't mention this earlier, but every book I've written, I've given myself some sort of deadline. This includes when I want each draft done. When I want to send a draft to my alpha or beta readers. When I want the final draft done. As I've worked on each book, I've learned that deadlines need to be treated with seriousness and not as a goal. As an indie author, what happens if you don't meet a deadline? The answer in my life, nothing other than a self-negativity that the world doesn't know about.

So, with Tennyson, how did I complete that deadline goal? I set a daily word count to achieve roughly 90k words. Since my previous books were around that number, I figured it was a good baseline goal to start with. That meant I needed to hit 3,400 words per day to make this happen. With that super detailed outline, a smidge of pantsing (because lets face it the characters do not always cooperate), a bit of pivoting when my initial planned outline caused me to scratch my head and voila! I had a completed decent first draft of my next book.

Now that you've read my writing history of each book, what do I plan to continue with my routine?

1. Outline. Outline. Outline. Should I scream it from the mountain top? OUTLINE. I may have loathed outlines in school, but whew do they keep me on track while writing my books.

2. Detailed into 3-5 bullet points of whats going to happen in each chapter so when I sit down to start writing I can glance over my notes, and know exactly where I'm going

3. I look over everything before I even begin writing. Is the story pacing the way I need? Is the romance too soon? I like writing slow burn because I like developing the plot, but that doesn't mean it needs to take half the book before that first kiss, either. That's a me thing though. If something isn't jiving, we're repeating steps one and two, until I'm satisfied. Once I'm happy, then it's the next steps.

4. Sitting down to write, I've made it a point to NEVER stop writing at the end of a chapter, but instead in the middle of something good. What do I mean by good? I mean something that I'll be extra excited about diving back into when I sit back down at my laptop. I found that if I go chapter to chapter, trying to start the next chapter can be very difficult if my head isn't back into the groove of writing yet.

5. DEADLINE. There isn't anyone here to slap me on the wrist if I don't complete it. Actually, I've given my 2 best friends permission to yell at me if I start sending Instagram reels or chatting too much instead of writing to get my word count in. One time, Amy called me up to yell at me. Guess who not only knocked out her word count goal but overly exceeded it that day? ME!

   
   

Things not added in there. I semi-polish as I write. What does that mean? I don't go back and reread what I've written until I'm satisfied, I keep trudging forward. BUT, if I see those little squiggly lines because of a spelling error or grammar, those I will fix. I've read that some authors keep pushing through and will fix all errors on their second draft. I tried that for a short jaunt in Kierian, and when I hit draft 2, I felt I spent more time in that section then anywhere else... So now I just make minimal corrections as I go.

A few times while writing Tennyson in chronological order sucked, i'll be blunt cause I wanted to get to a certain scene, but I found that if I got the (in my mind) difficult portion out of the way, then what I wanted to write would be worth the reward. Nothing about Tennyson was difficult to write, I was just impatient is all.

I'm positive, as I keep growing as an author, that I'll keep polishing and curating my writing routine, but I'm happy to say I found a baseline of what worked for me! It only took four books and an anthology novella to figure it out! However, the getting there of trial and error made me a bit frustrated, because as I mentioned earlier, I wanted my routine figured out pronto.

Writing Books I've read* that's helped me tremendously:

Save the cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

2,0000 to 10,000 by Rachel Aaron

7 Figure Fiction by T.Taylor

The universal fantasy list romance by T. Taylor

Writing to Market by Chris Fox

Romance your brand by Zoe York

Romance your plan by Zoe York

*I'm not affiliated or making an income by recommending these books, but I'm sure after this blog post, I'll have additional books added to my collection. Currently though, these are the books that I feel have helped make my writing strong or given me that 'aha! moment' that made everything click into place.