The story so far

It's been a crazy few days. Two weeks ago I finally got round to writing the Christmas-themed short story I was hoping to submit to Entangled Publishing. I'd been chatting on twitter with one of the editors there about the submissions she was looking for and deadlines for getting them in. I agreed with one of my writing group that we would both write stories for this, read each others' and submit them. She was much more organised about it than me and had both submitted and sadly been rejected before my story was even finished.

Anyway, I got 10,000 words down on the screen. It wasn't one of those stories that flowed naturally and I wasn't sure that I even liked it that much. But I sent it to my friend and another reader and they both made some great suggestions to improve the characterisations and the pacing. And then I emailed it off, with no real expectation of anything than another rejection.

The next day I heard back from the editor. She liked it! But she wanted a couple of changes. I made the changes and sent it back.

On Wednesday last week, I heard from the editor who had been assigned the story and I received the contract to sign. Wow! That made it feel really real. I signed the contract and sent it back to the US on Thursday.

On Friday morning, I got my story back from my editor. With 504 comments. On a 10,000 word story. I climbed down off cloud 9 pretty quickly when I opened that document. Admittedly, a lot of those comments were correcting to US spelling and punctuation, and a lot of the others were very minor changes. I worked through as well as I could, but it was hardgoing.

By Saturday, we'd got it down to 208 comments.

Then 50-something.

Then half a dozen.

And finally, about ten minutes ago, NO MORE COMMENTS. EDITS ARE DONE, folks.

Normally, they wouldn't work so quickly but because this is a Christmas romance, there is a very tight deadline to meet. It still has to go to the copyeditor and then the proofs have to be checked. I've no idea about cover art and I'm not even sure if the title has been agreed yet. But I think it's due out next week! I've a feeling that this week is going to be another whirlwind introduction to yet more aspects of publishing which aspiring authors never get told about. Stay tuned!