Sinking in, Amping Up

Well, it's finally starting to sink in a little bit–I've signed the contract, it's official.  I will have a book published, and it makes this Christmas pretty wonderful.  It also puts a rosy glow on the past year–but I'll have a full post mortem on 2010 sometime in the next few days.

Meanwhile, while I'm doped up on Dayquil and semi awake at work, I want to get my thoughts in order a little bit, and blogging seems the best way to do that.

Because the next few weeks are going to be crazy.  KER–AYYY–ZEE.

I'm coming to the end of the first-first round of edits.  Basically I got the editorial letter and a manuscript with line edits, and the issues broke down like this:

1. minor line edits that are more clarity/grammatical/rephrasing issues.  Easy.  Time consuming, but easy.

2. line edits that need more thought, like filling in context or fleshing out a moment.  Still easy, just more thought required.

3.  plot edits; both time consuming and thought requiring.  I really only had one of these that led to the ending being changed a little.  It was the one i was initially freaking out about, but once I found a way to tackle it, it was an easy change.

So now I'm almost through a first pass of the manuscript, going over line edits where ever they were marked on the manuscript.  There are some general edits that I will need to look the manuscript over with, which I haven't done yet, but this basically means I've done #3, almost all of #1 and still just have a bit of #2 to do.  All in all, I'm doing good.

Which is fantastic, because I need this done in about a week.  Two, if really necessary, but a week would be better.

A week would be better for my editor, so she can have some time to look it over again before Feb 1, which is the official final delivery date, and also better for me, because IGNITE the NITE, the fundraiser for IGNITE Change, is happening Jan 27th, and I have no idea how my head is NOT going to pop off in January.  We still need to solicit a huge number of donations for the silent auction and actually, you know, get the event itself off the ground.  Thank god I work with incredible women.

And, of course, because I need more things on my plate, I'm going to the SCBWI conference in New York Jan 28th-30th.  YUP.

Naturally, this means that I have presently come down with a heinous cold.  And I slipped and fell in slush today.  Mehhh.

What was my point again?

Mehhh.