I have finished another book! The last one I wrote, Handsome Enough to Tempt Him, was finished in late June and was only released last week. That is because we were having someone do a simulatenous audio book and had to wait for her to do it. There were other reasons but I don't know them. Part of the reason our writing partnership works is that Kevin does a bunch of stuff and I do a bunch of stuff and we leave certain decisions to the other person.
Kevin decides on when to publish.
The next book is coming out in like, three weeks. Wow! So we will have two long books a month apart!
Current one is sitting at over 100K words. I kept telling Kevin this book was going to be short, and then it wasn't.
This is very common for me, by the way.
I dislike this part of the writing process the most. I have to do a full edit of the book and keep track of disparate threads of the plot. I wrote the epilogues a few days ago, and then realized I had entirely forgotten a very important original character and had to insert him back in!
I have random notes on my desk to remind myself of names and details.
We print out the entire book on paper, and then Angela does an edit on paper, and I do a follow up edit on paper, and then I put the corrections into the Word document.
I cannot express how much I dislike this process. It is tedious and requires a lot of attention.
A couple of books ago, I discovered that when I finish a page, it gives me a blip of happy chemicals to rip it out of the binder, crumple it up, and throw it on the floor. So that is what I do.
I have thought long and hard about how blessed I am to be able to do this job. Lots of people cannot. I have major areas of weakness -- athletics, art, imagining battlefields -- but I can write! I can come up with interesting plots and keep track of all the threads pretty well. I make the occasional mistake but I am definitely pretty good at it.
And I didn't do anything to make that happen. I work very hard and I persevere and I am disciplined, bu the actual ability is a gift.
I am grateful.
And... back to work on editing!
