The first draft is the most challenging and time-demanding phase of the process. Once I get the first draft completed, things start to speed up. Here are a few highlights from my experience writing the first draft:

During the first edit, I work with one to two edit partners who read the text and give me feedback. In the second edit, I'm focused on story-level elements: continuity with the other books, important clues, and adding character emotion during dialogue. I love this stage, and it tends to go quickly. This is also where I often have to make the hard decision to cut certain scenes or significantly shorten scenes.

In this stage, I review the feedback from my edit team, and work to further focus the story.
I'll be cutting out scenes that don't contribute to the core story. I'll also do a deep dive on cause and effect.
This means that we have a clear idea of what Jake is experiencing, feeling about that experience, and how he decides to respond. Finally, I'll be looking for continuity issues: that the clues clearly work, times and dates are correct, and that I foreshadow events and decisions so that they make sense and feel natural to the reader.

In this stage, I'll be quickly (in 1-2 days) reading through the book to identify any places where the cause/effect elements of the story are not working or might cause confusion. In addition to fixing these elements, I'll be taking notes on specific places in the manuscript that I want to revisit to: create active attribution where there are now just "talking heads," bring out the emotional responses of the characters, tighten long descriptions, and edit clunky sentences.

I'll be working through a specific set of edits to make the copy ready and readable for my beta team.

This takes me most of one day. I use a software called Vellum to format the interior and Photoshop to format the cover. I also do some final typo check. My beta versions contain numerous mistakes. However, I try to make it as readable as possible. You don't want simple errors to distract from the reading experience.

I now collaborate with my daughter on the illustrations. We draw them using the pencil and watercolor tools in Adobe Fresco. We'll be working on these throughout the writing process.

I have a small team who I work with to proofread the books. This is not my beta reader team. In fact, I ask my beta readers to not do any proofreading (because I want to hear about their experience of the story). The proof team is sending me edits at the same time as the beta team.

After all the presale copies are in the mail, I'll hit the publish button on Amazon. This can take their systems anywhere from 12-72 for the books to become available online.