revising

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Kay: Good News!

The proof copy! It’s brighter in real life, too.

I complain so often and so regularly about the problems I have with writing or publishing or marketing (or even finding topics to blog about) that when I fretted to a friend today about what I could talk about, she said, tell people that your book came out.

And I said, nobody cares about that, and she said, if they care about your complaining, why wouldn’t they care about your successes?

So that’s my news for this week: Ms. Matched came out, seventeen years after I first put pen to paper. It’s been three long revision passes, a 25 percent word reduction, and about six title changes, but finally this story has been taken out from under the bed, dusted off, and sent out into the world. I’m happy for her. She’s a cute little thing. And my critique partner Patricia said that I’d created a new genre, too! One that has no antagonist and no conflict of any kind. And she had to worry about something, so she worried about the gold fish. (Spoiler alert: the gold fish is fine.)

So that’s it for me today. Ms. Matched is flexing her muscle in the marketplace. While I am here, working on the revisions for the next book. And complaining about it, of course. What about you?

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Kay: Writing to a Standstill

from Double Debt Single Woman

I have several manuscripts—all my early ones—sitting on my hard drive. Some time ago, I decided I should revise them into acceptable shape and put them out there.

Well, that’s easier said than done. The first one, which had had two heavy edits over the years, went great. It’s my first book, and in working on it again, I remembered how much fun I’d had with it all those years ago when I’d started it, how my spirits lifted every day when I sat down to it and I thought, I can do this. One light edit later, I finished it, and I’m happy with it. The cover’s done, and with luck, I’ll get it published in the next few weeks.

However, the second book is, as we say, another story altogether. When I wrote it all those years ago, my critique partner said several times that my hero wasn’t heroic enough, so I put it aside until I understood what she meant. Now I do. And I realized in shock that not only is my hero not heroic enough, he’s a jerk of the first water. How did that happen? Continue reading →

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Kay: Learning Experiences

I wrote here a couple weeks ago about my first three novels and how they’ve been languishing on my hard drive—and my recent efforts to finally bring them into the world. I did a few strong passes on the first one, tightened the language, sharpened the conflict (what little of it there is), and cut about twenty-five percent. Now it’s almost ready to launch.

I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but writing these books was a learning experience. You’d think I’d get the hang of it quicker, but no. Well, you could make the argument that every book presents its own challenges, and I’d be happy to make that argument myself. But I still always feel that I should be finding my characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts a lot sooner, not to mention figure out what they like for breakfast or where they go on vacation. Continue reading →

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Kay: Quiz for Y’All—Romantic Conflict

image via sleepcity.com

I’ve been working through the revision suggestions a development editor gave me for the third book of My Eternal Trilogy, and I’m stumped on one point. She says that there’s no conflict between my two main characters, and I have to write it in there.

She’s right about the first part. My characters have no interpersonal conflict. Trouble, yes. Conflict, no.

I don’t disagree about the importance of conflict, but I’m not convinced that the enormous amount of work I’d need to do to create a conflict between my hero and heroine and then resolve it is necessary or even desirable. Here’s my thinking.

Continue reading →

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Kay: Learning Curve(ball)

I’m closing in on finishing a trilogy I’ve been working on for some time. Book 1 is out; this is the cover. Book 2 is at the copy editor, due back at the end of April. I’m still revising Book 3 before it goes to copy edit.

My goal is to make these books as light-hearted as possible. I want them to be the literary equivalent of meringue—a whisper of sweetness on the tongue. I want them to be funny. I want every single person and animal—even the villains—to have a happy ending. I want these books to make readers feel better even if they read them on their worst days.

Book 1 went fine, but Book 2 was a killer. I had difficult personal issues going on at the time I wrote it, and when I went back to it for revisions, it did not read like meringue. It read like day-old oatmeal—heavy, dry, and lumpy. Totally unappetizing. I complained about it on this forum, but I will save you a dreary whine by not posting the link. Continue reading →

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Kay: Out with the Old

One of my plans for the new year is to resurrect the finished manuscripts sitting on my hard drive and see if I can revise them into suitable shape for publication. The likeliest candidate for this treatment is the first manuscript I wrote. Years ago a well-known publishing company put it into a cycle of “accept with revisions/accept/on hold/accept with revisions” for two years before my editor moved on and it was finally rejected by her replacement. That’s traditional publishing for you! Today, thanks to indie publishing, I can revise it the way I want and publish it myself.

Progress. Continue reading →

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Kay: Revision—Harder Than It Seems

photo by DoubleDebtSingleWoman.com

I’ve been in the throes of revision for some time (and will be for some time to come). Recently, I was stuck on something my development editor told me to do: shorten the first three chapters by combining them in two. When I looked at the material, I saw she was right that the chapters were too long, and I deleted without qualms about 3,000 words—one-third of the material the editor thought needed to go. But how to combine the chapters? What else had to be cut? I didn’t see a way.

Enter Jilly. She read the pages and offered some great suggestions. When I looked at her comments, all I could think was, why didn’t I see that?

Revision is hard, maybe harder than writing the first draft. Continue reading →

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Kay: The Indie Paradox

I’ve been struggling this past week about what it means to be a writer and how much time and treasure a person should sink into the process. Let me explain.

Several years ago, the company for which I freelanced forwarded a request to me from a person who was looking for editorial help on his fiction project. He’s a nice guy, my contact said, who has a story to tell.

The writer told me he’d written a draft, but it needed more work and he wasn’t sure how to go about it. It was 216 pages.

I asked him what he wanted me to do. A line or content edit? Write the transitions? Shape it? Continue reading →

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Kay: Keeping It Fresh Forever

Photo by Leonardo Quatrocchi from Pexels

My long-term project (probably years long, the way I’m going) is to read all the books on the bookshelves in my office and then afterwards, move them, and eventually the shelves, out of the house. I’m going to need the space for other things.

The first book I assigned myself was a Virago Modern Classics reprint. These are books by female authors, originally published at other houses, some from many decades previously. Virago has published its Modern Classics imprint since the 1970s, and the [many] books I own are all from this period. So far, they’ve been rather hit-or-miss in terms of how well they’ve held up to #MeToo and #TimesUp sensibilities. Continue reading →

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Kay: To Revise, or Not to Revise

Image from Electric Literature.com

Some time ago I heard a woman tell a story about how she’d sent a manuscript to her publisher, and her editor sent her a 17-page, single-space revision letter. That would be a revision letter approximately 12 percent of the entire length of the manuscript. Hearing that made me happy, not for the first time, that I didn’t have a publishing contract.

However, self-pubbing is not for the faint of heart, as most of us attest to every day in these posts. The other day I got the revision letter from my freelance editor, a woman with many years’ experience editing romance at a big publishing house, and it was a winner, as far as I was concerned: only six pages for a 269-page manuscript. Not nearly the work of my fellow writer from the first paragraph. Continue reading →