The Agony and The Ecstasy….

I’m sure I must be the slowest writer in the world. Honestly this road to publication is a long and winding one, and I’m not exactly zooming along. More like creeping with ten pound weights tied to my ankles.

I finally sent my MS of the first book to an editor that I met a couple of years ago at the When Words Collide conference, and who was interested in working with me. She not only does the line by line edits in terms of spelling and grammar, but also takes a look at the big picture. Story structure, pacing, characters, etc. In the meantime, I have been forging ahead on edits to Book Two.

Just last week I got the edits back. Gulp. The truth hurts, right?

A lot of what she said is definitely truth. So it’s all good. But it’s hard to know exactly where to start to fix it. I have a lot of work and rewriting ahead, and it’s hard not to be discouraged by that, but it’s okay. Ultimately I want this to be the best effort I can muster, so I’m willing to do the work.

There’s a lot of trimming to do (she took out whole chapters!) and a lot of thinking on how to make it all work. It might turn out that I have only two books, not three. I know that one of my failings as a writer is to overwrite – not only in the story but also on a sentence level. So having to trim and condense isn’t necessarily a bad thing. (See? “Trim and condense?” I could have just said “condense”. Overwriting. Heh.)

I have some homework to do in terms of some articles and books to read, so I will get to work on those and then sit down with my book to see how I can whip it into shape. Leaner and hopefully better.

I’ll keep you posted.