Good morning all of my loyal followers. All 5 of you :). I took a bit of a break from my writing and posting in order to do the work that currently pays my bills. I’m a Chartered Professional Accountant by trade so you might as well just pretend I don’t exist between February and oh, sometime around now. It really puts a dent in the time I have available to write! But I guess it’s just more incentive to get the darn books finished and out there so I can start selling them.
This week I started my…. 26th revision of Double Diamond….OK maybe not exactly 26th but it feels like it. I want to add another 10 to 20,000 words to the book overall with more dialogue and less of me just rambling on about what’s going on. My characters need to interact more, they seem to do a lot of talking to themselves and that makes for a boring conversation…and makes me a bit concerned they are developing a bit of schizophrenia. And I’ve got to make sure I’m showing and not telling. Sometimes I’m in such a rush to get the idea of the scene down that I don’t let it play out between the characters, I just say what happened. Oh, and the ending is too abrupt. That seems to be one of my biggest problems, I run out of steam and realistic conflicts after about 50,000 words and just end it. I’m working on that. And yes, I know it doesn’t have to be perfect, in fact it will never be perfect, it just has to not be totally boring and actually out there so I can start marketing it. Letting go is not easy!
So I should have that 26th revision done in the next week or so. I’ll be getting my cover model to send a few pictures to pick from by the middle of July, and I have my graphic designer friend on standby for when I finally get my shit together enough to send her the details for the cover art, OK not exactly on standby, but she’s agreed to help me and will fit it in when she can, it’s almost standby.
I have chosen August first as my publish date deadline. Which means to say that I hope to have everything in order by then so I’m not writing my blog August 1st talking about the new deadline of September 1st, because when that happens all of a sudden we’re back in tax season and I’m looking at next August again.
So check out the Double Diamond link and let me know what you think of the latest round of revisions. I’m up to chapter 10, but I’m not averse to starting on revision number 27 if you find something that needs more tweaking 😉