To send or not to send…

Sending a new book off to a publisher is never an easy thing to do. It’s at this time when you enter writing limbo, and the experience is not a very nice one.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a published author or not, the angst is still the same.

The book you’ve been toiling over for the last nine months seems, quite suddenly, not very good in your own mind. The plot feels weak, and the characters are not the exciting, well-rounded and emotionally deep people you’ve been working with all of that time. Abruptly, they’ve become stiff, two-dimensional and boring. You wonder what on earth your editor is going to say; part of you wants him or her to put you out of your misery and come back with a quick response saying it’s the worst thing they have ever read, the other side of you wants them to put it in a drawer and leave it there.

Time to work on something else, you think – a short story maybe, or a rework of the other novel that you’ve been dipping in and out of for the last two years. Easier said than done because the worry continues to nag away at you, like a torn cuticle at the side of your finger that you can’t seem to help but catch at every opportunity. And it’s worse if you’re writing a series. If the first book sucks as bad as you think it does, how can you start to work out how the next one is going to come together? The only thing to do is wait: wait and hope that your worries are, to some extent at least, unfounded.

So that’s where I am now: in publishing purgatory. Book one in a new series has been drafted and now resides in the hands of my editor.

Watch this space and I’ll tell you how it went.