Taylor Leigh

The Soul Weaver was the first novel I ever wrote, the first novel I ever queried, and it’s the book of my heart. It earned me 13 requests from agents and even though it wasn’t the book that got me agented, it taught me so much.

While writing it, I endured three incredibly painful losses. I poured that grief, love, and heartache into Astraea’s experience, pulling from my own emotional experience.

Once Dragon Glass was out of my hands, I debated on whether or not to revisit TSW or not, but with OPOP in percolating mode (see What I’m Working on Part I) and Chaos Story a bit of an outlier (see What I’m Working On Part II), I decided to reread my manuscript with fresh eyes.

I fell in love all over again. AFTER I got over how much better it could be, of course.

I immediately noted the desperate need for more voice and introspection. The antagonist needed more layers, the romantic subplot needed more tension, and the world could use a little expansion.

Since then, I’ve been bouncing between TSW and OPOP. Truth be told, coming back to this story feels a lot like coming home. I’m currently ~15k words into my revision, though I haven’t been pushing myself. My goal is to switch to OPOP by October, so that gives me a few months to hammer out the changes in TSW while I prep what I need for drafting OPOP to go as smoothly as possible.

This brings us to a close (for now) of all the projects I’m currently working on! I have a few ideas sitting in my “nuggets” folder that I still want to get to, but those are for another day, err…month, err…year…