The People You Trust has been out in the world for three weeks now, which means readers are meeting Rose for the first time at the exact moment I’m back in Millstone Falls doing the least glamorous work in publishing: editing the second book.
What Editing a Book Actually Entails
I want to talk about what that actually means, because I’ve learned most readers picture editing as a sort of vigorous proofreading. Commas. Typos. The occasional stern note about a dangling modifier. That part exists, but it comes last, and it’s the easy part. What I’m doing right now is the other thing — the structural edit — and the best way I can describe it is this: I’m trying to read a book I wrote as if I’ve never met me.
That’s harder than it sounds. I know where every body is buried in this manuscript, sometimes literally. I know which chapters I wrote in a fever and which ones I had to lay siege to. The draft and I have history. A structural edit means setting all of that aside and asking the questions a stranger would ask: Why is this scene here? What does she want in this chapter? Did the middle just… sag? (It sagged. Middles sag. It’s what they’re for.)
So the first pass isn’t fixing anything. It’s making a map. Every scene gets a line: who’s in it, what changes, what the reader now knows that they didn’t before. When you lay a book out like that, its skeleton shows — and so do the places where I apparently decided a character could be in two places at once, or where a secret gets revealed twice because past me didn’t trust you to catch it the first time. (I should have. You people caught things in Book 1 that I planted so deep I’d half forgotten them. I’ve seen your emails. I’m frightened and delighted.)
Keeping Millstone Falls Book 2 Honest
Which brings me to the part of series-writing nobody warned me about: the continuity bible. When you write about a town where everybody’s somebody’s cousin and half of them are lying, you become the fact-checker for your own liars. Not just what’s true — that’s the easy ledger — but who believes what, and when they started believing it, and who told them, and whether the person who told them was lying at the time. I maintain records on fictional people’s dishonesty like a small-town clerk with a grudge. It is the most tedious work I do and I will die defending it, because the whole contract of this series is that the secrets hold together. You are welcome to trust no one in Millstone Falls. You should be able to trust the ledger.
So What’s The Big Deal?
And here’s the genuinely new thing about Book 2: I’m editing it in front of an audience for the first time. Book 1 was written in a locked room — nobody waiting, nobody with opinions. This one is different. Some of you have feelings about certain residents of Millstone Falls, and I know what they are, because again: I’ve seen your emails. I’m doing my best to un-know them while I work. The book has to be the book it was always going to be, not a referendum. But I’d be lying if I said the room didn’t feel occupied now. It’s a good pressure. It’s also pressure.
What To Expect In Future Posts
One housekeeping note about this blog, so we set the table properly: I’m going to write about decisions here — what got cut, what got moved, what a scene is for — because decisions are where the interesting stuff lives. I find process talk about as compelling as a tour of someone’s spice rack. The meal is the point. Expect dispatches every few weeks, including, if you’re good, a small ongoing series of lines I cut from Book 1 and the crimes they committed to deserve it.
Back to the map. The middle isn’t going to unsag itself.
— KTG
© K.T. George 2026 | This post was first seen on ktgeorge.com | Photo by Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash