Confluence is finished for the moment

Today we mailed off the manuscript for CONFLUENCE to our editor.

It’s finished, but it’s nowhere near finished either.

Our editor will come back with suggestions, we’ll make changes based on those suggestions.  She’ll come back with more, and the whole process will go around and around until we’re all satisfied.

This is the first time our agent, Caitlin, is seeing the story this late. We normally send it to her first, and she gives us feedback before we send it to Anne.  With both the previous books we’ve done big rewrites after Caitlin’s feedback.

As you can imagine, we’re nervous.

We told the story we wanted to tell. We’re happy with how it turned out.

Even so, we’re way too close to it at the moment to know if it’s any good. In an ideal writing world, we’d put it away for a couple of months now, and come back to it after the break, when we have some distance from it.  Given we don’t have the luxury of that time, we’re very grateful for the editor and agent feedback.

What next?

That was the final book we were contracted to write. We don’t know what comes next. We don’t have a book we must write. That will depend on what Caitlin can sell, which in turn, depends a lot on how well the Linesman series is received.

We have lots of stories to tell.

We got into some bad habits while writing this book. We certainly need to exercise more, and to clean house more. A first draft in under three months? That’s the ideal if we want time to put the story away between major drafts.