I'd finished four books including the one I sold to a small press, but the first three were very, very bad. One one other was YA and it was very cliched boy-fights-demonic-monsters, but it has pieces I still love. No one else will ever see it. XD

The one I sold was not planned as a series. It was, in fact, a novella, meant to be a stand alone. I signed with a small press to turn it into a series. They helped me make it longer, but I'm still struggling to build out the world enough to finish book 3 and wonder if agreeing to turn it into a series wasn't a mistake, as the world wasn't created to support that much story and it's feeling stretched very thin to me at this point. Plus now I'm stuck with decisions I made quickly in book 2.

Writing book 2 was a miserable experience for me because I didn't know what I was doing. Though I'd written four books, I didn't actually know the mechanics of story structure or how books worked. I'd sort of intuited it by reading a lot. And I think that's true for a lot of authors. You get the first sold book polished because you have so many rounds of beta readers and revisions and manage to make it Good Enough but then you're told to write book 2, and it's like.. wait, how? How is a series structured? What function should a book 2 have? I've actually been relieved to hear on panels this year that The Hell of Book 2 is a common experience, because I felt very broken throughout the process, like I was a hack who couldn't cut it, and the mess of drafting book 2 was proof.

I've learned a lot about story structure and outlining and even series structure in the process, and I'm working on other series that are much better planned out. I'm still having trouble with Book 3, though, because I feel like I made mistakes in book 2 that I can't overcome.