These past few days have been spent waiting to hear my editor’s comments on the first eleven chapters I revised. As I mentioned last week, to keep busy during the lull, I resumed work on my fourth novel Casey Holland novel. It’s been a treat to let my thoughts go in all kinds of creative direction without deadline pressures. As often happens with me though, that creative direction went off track in spots, and my critique group offered insightful comments to make me rethink a few things. Right now I’m up to chapter four and hope the momentum will keep building. Oddly enough, I’m getting my best ideas while I’m walking at work these days, so I’ve spent more than a few breaks scribbling down notes.
On Thursday I heard back from my editor about my revisions to those eleven chapters and her comments were positive, thank heaven. But she too has been in the zone with new ideas—terrific ideas—so I’m back to tweaking some of those first ten chapters and working a couple of major rewrites on the latter two. After four days of heavy focus on chapters nine through eleven, I’m ready to move onto chapter twelve. What puzzles me most about this process so far, is that after writing nine drafts of this book before I even sent it to this publisher, why didn’t I think of these ideas sooner? Sheesh. One of the many things I’ve learned from this process is the benefit of having experienced readers or editors read your book in its entirety. You’ll never know what ideas they might come up with and some of those ideas could turn your good book into a great one.
The working title, Deadly Resurrection, which I’ve been using for quite some time is too similar to another mystery my publisher released, so it’s back to the drawing board for titles. When we’ve decided on the right one (and this is a joint effort), I’ll let you know.
As always, my amateur sleuth, Vancouver-based, Alex Bellamy mysteries can be purchased at
FATAL ENCRYPTION, http://tinyurl.com/ddzsxl
TAXED TO DEATH, http://tinyurl.com/czsy5n
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