What'cha Writing?

So since Sonata’s been released for a whopping week, it’s time for me to buckle down and really work on the next project.

Which is… Tryst!

I know, I know. Caprice has an entire year before it’s release. And before you yell, let me tell you why:

I just can’t keep that pace up anymore. I like to make a point of making the Rhapsody Quartet as polished as possible, and that is incredibly time consuming.

I’m not complaining. I love working on my books. It’s my favorite thing. I love being in that world, I love where the characters lead things, I love gently steering the story back to its intended course. But my books are pretty long— Prelude was about 90,000 words and Sonata was 115,000. Caprice will probably be at least the length of Sonata, and Nocturne (that big, scary, hopefully epic conclusion) will likely be around 150,000 by the time it’s finished (but there’s so much that needs to be done on that manuscript, I’m not promising anything about word counts).

There’s a few phases to my books:
1.  Rough draft. This is where I basically vomit up a half-baked idea onto the screen. There’s some good ideas in there, somewhere, but oh, man are there problems.

2.  Revisions. My absolute favorite. The story gets refined. I read through, ID the major problems, chuck out the bad and write new, good content. At the end of this I have something somewhat resembling a book in my hands. The most bang for my buck, as it were.

3. Beta reading!!! Shipped off to betas to make sure that pacing, flow, characters, etc are decent. I get real feedback, and that makes me all warm and tingly.

4. Hail mary revisions. Sort of the last ditch “Oh, so and so thought that Y leading up to X is that my intention? Maybe I should refine this/Clarify this/Change this.” 

5. Line edits. This is as time consuming as the initial draft is. Ugh. As the name implies, I take it line-by-line with my trusty editor. This is done chapter by chapter, and every scene can take anywhere from 1 hour to 8 depending on how things go. But in the end, I have a copy in my hands that is almost finished with solid grammar and good word-smithing. We take turns reading it aloud so we can catch things that just plain sound funny, too. My line editor deserves a medal for this part, because seriously, it can be PAINFUL.

6. Final read-through/AR copies. I add in my backend material and my front end stuff (contents, dedication, title page) and send it off to my Advanced Copy Readers so I can have at least one day 1 review. I also do another quick read through to make sure that there is decent flow, character voice, and that I didn’t miss anything during the line edit phase.

7. Release. Which really means promote, promote, promote!

As you can see, it’s kind of an involved process, and every step is vital to creating a good book. Caprice is, at this moment, at step 4. But I don’t have time to work on my late revisions, because I have Tryst.

And you should be excited about Tryst! It’s a book from Marin’s perspective detailing what was going on while the events of Sonata were happening. It’s still pretty long (50,000 words!) and it’s one of my very favorite stories.

So right now I’m working on that. Then in the late summer I can start seriously working on Caprice again. <3

- Ang