Empty Spot on My Shelf Needs Filling
It’s almost nine as I write this, and the sun is just peeking over the neighbor’s house. I’ve yet to see a car, dog, or jogger, but the squirrels are out. Ice has sealed down the koi pond, and the bird feeders are full, and there’s a spot on my shelf for one more book. Looks to me like it’s time to kick some more ass.
Yep, I should have been taking the week off between Christmas and New Years, and I kept half that promise by not posting. It gave me an extra hour or so a day, which I really appreciated since I’ve BEEN WORKING ON PERI FOR FIVE DAYS!
And I’m really enjoying myself.
Crap on toast, but it seems like forever since I’ve been this excited about something. The last couple of Hollows books were great, but it was the joy of tying off of threads and building conclusions. I’m back to building possibilities, leaving things open, proposing ideas and walking away to see what the characters do with them, and I am loving it. Maybe I am a “like beginnings better” kind of a girl. (shrug)
But regardless, I’ve been working in silence this last week, and it feels good to be posting again. I’ve got a new editor and I like her style though it is a lot. . . louder than I’m used to. (This is a good thing.) I truly miss my marked up, messy paper where I struggle to read my editor’s handwriting more than I thought I would, but you grow or you die. And I hope she understands after looking at my first submission with a probable feeling of “Where’s the Kim sparkle?” that it’s in the editorial rewrite that I put in a lot of the sparkle and shine. I don’t have a clue what I’m doing until I get someone else’s ideas in there too, and I know it.
So . . . every rewrite is a chance to become a better writer, try things out, put more tools in the tool box so to speak. This time, the biggest limb I’m going out on that wasn’t editorial suggested is taking something that was personal and good and tweaking it to be common knowledge and scary–until Peri figures it out and it becomes good again. I didn’t see this possibility in the first handful of my personal rewrites, I didn’t see it in the submission copy, but after finishing the extremely ugly rough draft of book two a few months ago, (which is really no more than an idea, a sketch, a maybe framed by text and chapters,) I think this is the right thing to do. Scary as it is.
Happy New Year!
