Today, I had that heart-in-mouth moment when I pressed send. The email itself was brief. The attachment was not. The novel I completed clocks in at 99k. And if the editing process goes anything like Highfell Grimoires did, I can expect to see about 10k cut, 20k completely rewritten, and another 10k of original text added during revisions.

Naturally, I hope that the editor will tell me, “This is fabulous! It’s perfect. I can’t believe you wrote such an amazing book, and with a few tweaks, we’l...