How I Balance Drafting, Revising, and Promoting

There is a version of the writing life where an author wakes up early, drafts two thousand words, revises a chapter over lunch, posts something thoughtful and engaging on every social platform, answers emails, updates their website, and still has enough energy left to read before bed.

I do not live in that version.

At any given time, I am usually juggling several parts of being an author. Right now, I am drafting a few novels in the background, including a religious horror story temporarily called Mercy, a sequel to the fantasy novel I am revising, and additional books in a planned seven-book series. I am revising that fantasy novel, currently identified by the deeply inventive temporary title Elyse and Cassia, after its two main characters. At the same time, I am promoting The Colors That Haunt Us ahead of its October release.

Technically, I am drafting, revising, and promoting all at once.

That does not mean I am giving all three equal attention.

For me, balance is not dividing every day into perfectly measured pieces. It is knowing which kind of work needs to lead right now, which work can continue quietly in the background, and which work needs to be kept alive with the smallest sustainable effort.

I work in seasons, not perfectly balanced days

My usual system is two months of drafting followed by one month of revision.

During drafting months, I focus on forward motion. I want to stay connected to the story long enough to build momentum and keep the characters, world, and emotional arc active in my mind. Other ideas still exist, but the main drafting project receives most of my creative attention.

Then I shift into a revision month. Drafting does not necessarily stop completely, especially when another project is being loud, but revision becomes the primary work.

My phone calendar reminds me which kind of month I am supposed to be in. This may not be the most elaborate project-management system in existence, but it keeps me from reaching the middle of a month and wondering what I had intended to prioritize.

Of course, writing schedules are excellent until a book decides not to cooperate.

I broke my usual pattern this month because Elyse and Cassia has required far more revision than I expected. I had to delete roughly a third of the novel and rewrite that material from scratch. At that point, the distinction between drafting and revising becomes less useful. I am revising the existing structure, drafting replacement scenes, checking continuity, reconsidering character arcs, and trying to make sure the rewritten material belongs to the same novel as everything around it.

Sometimes a revision month is really a drafting month wearing an old manuscript as a disguise.

The schedule still helps, but it cannot become more important than the book itself. I use it to give my work direction, not to force a project into a process that no longer fits.

Drafting and revising use different parts of my attention

Drafting and revising are fairly equal for me in terms of difficulty. They are difficult in different ways, but neither feels inherently worse.

Drafting asks me to tolerate uncertainty. I have to move forward before every detail is perfect, trust the planning I have done, and accept that some scenes will eventually need to be replaced. Even as an extensive planner, I still discover things while writing. Characters resist the shape I expected them to take. Emotional beats need more room. A subplot that looked useful in an outline may become unnecessary once it reaches the page.

Revision asks for a different kind of honesty. I have to look at something I already worked hard on and decide whether that effort is actually serving the novel.

Deleting a third of a manuscript is not particularly fun. It is also sometimes the correct choice.

The deleted work was not necessarily wasted. It helped me understand what the book was trying to become, even if it could not remain in the final version. That is easier to say after the deletion than it is while selecting several chapters and pressing the button.

Switching between drafting and revision every few months gives me enough time to settle into each mode. I am not asking myself to invent freely in the morning and then become a ruthless structural editor that afternoon. I can stay inside one kind of thinking long enough to make meaningful progress.

This is also why I do not try to touch every project every day. There are several novels developing in the background, but they do not all need equal access to me at once. Some receive notes. Some receive scenes during a writing sprint. Some wait until their designated drafting period.

A project can still be alive without being the center of my schedule.

Most of my writing happens in small spaces

I work full-time from home at a desk. I also deal with chronic fatigue and chronic back pain, which means spending several additional uninterrupted hours at that same desk is often unrealistic.

A lot of my writing happens during work breaks or through sprinting events in a Discord community I am active in.

Those sessions may not resemble the idealized image of an author disappearing into a beautiful office for an entire afternoon. They are often short, focused stretches of work fitted between other obligations. They still count.

Writing during breaks helps me maintain contact with a project without requiring one enormous reserve of energy at the end of the day. Discord sprints give the time a clear boundary and add enough external structure to help me begin. I do not have to feel capable of writing all evening. I only have to write for the length of the sprint.

This has also shaped how I think about consistency. Consistency does not have to mean producing the same number of words every day. It can mean returning to the work often enough that I still know where I am when I open the document.

Some days that produces a full scene. Other days it produces a paragraph, a corrected transition, or a note about what needs to happen next.

The work accumulates either way.

Promotion is the part I find hardest

Drafting and revising are forms of storytelling. Even when they are difficult, I understand what they are asking me to do.

Marketing often feels like standing in the middle of a room and announcing, “This is my book. Please press the buttons?”

I know the book intimately, but knowing a book and knowing how to promote it are not the same skill. It can be difficult to decide which details will attract the right readers without repeating the same summary in slightly different words.

I also do not want every post to sound like a direct advertisement. Constantly saying that a book exists is not especially interesting for me or for the person reading the post.

What has made promotion more manageable is treating the book itself as the source of the content.

Instead of inventing an entirely separate marketing identity, I can talk about the things already inside the novel: its tropes, emotional dynamics, excerpts, atmosphere, characters, themes, visual palette, and the questions that shaped it. A post about queer longing tangled with possession is promotional, but it is also a genuine description of the story. A quote card gives readers a sample of the prose. A moodboard communicates tone without asking me to summarize the plot again.

The preorder link may remain the same, but the reason someone might care about clicking it changes from post to post.

That approach does not make marketing effortless. It does make it feel more connected to writing and less like a completely unrelated job I must perform after the creative work is over.

I plan far ahead, but I do not treat the plan as law

Sundays are usually when I plan and schedule social media posts.

I use a spreadsheet for my marketing calendar and Buffer to schedule posts. At the moment, I have content planned through October. That does not mean every post between now and release is immovable.

The calendar is a guideline.

Planning ahead reduces the pressure to come up with something new every morning, especially when I am also working, revising, drafting, and managing limited energy. It lets me see whether I have repeated one type of post too often, gone too long without mentioning preorders, or forgotten an important launch milestone.

It also gives me something to ignore when circumstances change.

A planned excerpt may no longer suit the week. I may finish a new graphic I would rather share. A post may feel too similar to something I recently published. Sometimes I simply do not have the energy to prepare what the calendar says I should.

The plan exists to carry some of the mental load. It is not another authority I have to disappoint.

This distinction matters because detailed planning can easily become another form of pressure. I am a significant planner by nature. My planning documents can reach the length of short stories, and my larger projects accumulate extensive folders of notes and articles. That preparation helps me work, but only when I remember that a plan is a tool rather than a contract with my past self.

I protect the creative work from the launch

Promoting The Colors That Haunt Us has not substantially reduced the amount of drafting I do. Part of that is because my writing already happens in smaller spaces: work breaks, Discord sprints, and whatever focused time I can build around the rest of my life.

I do not need an entire open day before I am allowed to work on another book.

This is important to me because releases can consume every available thought. There is always another graphic that could be made, another post that could be scheduled, another way to adjust a description, or another platform I could theoretically be using.

There is no natural end point to promotion. Creative work needs one to be imposed.

Keeping other stories active reminds me that releasing a book is part of my writing life, not the conclusion of it. The Colors That Haunt Us deserves attention, but it does not need to devour every project behind it.

The balance may be uneven. Some weeks involve more graphics and scheduling. Some involve substantial revision. Some give me enough energy for only a few short drafting sessions.

The goal is not to make every part equal. The goal is to keep marketing from consuming the work that gave me something to market.

What currently works for me

My system is not especially complicated:

I choose a primary creative mode for each month. I use Sundays to plan promotional content. I keep the marketing calendar flexible. I write during small, available stretches instead of waiting for ideal conditions. I allow several projects to exist without demanding constant progress from all of them.

Most importantly, I measure balance across months rather than days.

One day may contain nothing but revision. Another may be mostly marketing. A difficult week may produce less visible work than I hoped. None of those moments represents the whole process.

Over time, the pages accumulate. The manuscript changes. The scheduled posts appear. The release moves closer.

I am still learning how to promote a book without feeling as though I am repeatedly asking strangers to press the buttons. I am still adjusting my drafting and revision cycle when a manuscript demands more than I planned to give it. I am still learning how much work my body and attention can sustain.

Balance, for me, is not reaching a point where none of these things compete.

It is building enough structure that I can decide which one wins today—and trusting that the others will have their turn.

Cover Image by: Akram Huseyn on Unsplash