I am spending a TON of time on this round of Cursed Witch editing at the moment, and loving it. It's still hard work, and it was hard work getting to the point when I could do this, but it's all coming together and feeding into each other and that's a great feeling. The worldbuilding is being refined even further, leading to new ideas that magically solve other problems I had on the backburner, so my brain was likely working on it the whole time even without my active input.

It's still all a bit strange. At first, going on yet another round of structural editing after so long felt like ghostwriting someone else's story. Then because the changes started getting smaller, and generating more ideas of their own, it felt like creating fic for it, haha. Now, I don't know, I work on it in the morning and at night and the story and world and characters are constantly living in my head, in a "love you guys" kinda way rather than the "OH MY GOD I AM SO SICK OF THIS STORY" way I had reached last year. I always had a vague idea for 2 potential sequels, a one-line summary ready for each which was interesting but apparently not enough to actually make me really plan to ever write them. Now I'm adding more details to that "Sequels ideas" file once or twice (or thrice!) a day, peppering little hints of foreshadowing, sometimes even bits that work in layers so that (I think) one can think are related to the current story, but should someone care enough to re-read later after knowing what happens in book 2 or 3, then some sentences take on a completely different meaning. And I'm thinking maybe I'd quite like to take a stab at book 2 once I've handled the Soul Thief structural edits? I also had a "fatal flaws" file about a couple of points I thought made the story broken at a fundamental level, but I believe I managed to smooth or fix that to an acceptable degree to me anyway :D

I am so excited. Obviously, working/editing at the current pace would not be sustainable, but I'm just making a big push while all that motivation and excitement are bursting at the seams. And I know this is all flowing relatively well thanks to all the thinking and prep work I did, even if it felt like it was taking forever. I had to summarise my summaries of beta-reader comments because it was still too long to easily reference XD But I think this kind of exercise is what's helping keeping as much as possible in my head.

May this energy last until I finish this round of editing, too...!! Haha. One can hope. Back to it, now.