Thursday Thoughts

As you may have seen on Facebook last night, I finally finished the last edits of Hero, which will be out in August. It's a little scary sending a book in for the last time. I'll never be able to change anything in that book again. It is now, for all intents and purposes, carved in stone.

I hope I got it in soon enough that the books will be back from the printer in time for the booksigning in Orlando, but you never know how these things will go. I should have had them in by the 6th, but they sent them to me the day before I left for RT and I worked three nights in a row when I got home. I took that last day at RT to work on it, but one run-through is never enough (I prefer three). However, just as I finished the second pass, I got an email from Sourcebooks wanting to know when I'd have it finished. It was one of those "what the hell" moments that come to writers from time to time. You feel as though you've done all you can do at this point and it's time to run that book up a flagpole and see who salutes it.

One thing about those final edits is that you see so many things you'd like to change. A writer's technique evolves (at least, mine has) over the course of several manuscripts, and what seemed perfect three months ago isn't so perfect anymore. By perfect I don't mean spelling corrections. There was only one mistake in the galley they sent me, which was that the name of Jack's ship wasn't formatted in italics in one place. Aside from that, it WAS perfect. But there were also some things that were deleted in the last rewrite that needed to be added back in. In that way, leaving something for a few months helps you to realize those things, plus, some of the workshops at RT jarred my memory for things that needed tweaking.

The trouble with those last edits is that you can't change a whole helluva lot. A sentence, word, or phrase here and there is fine, but this is not the time to make major revisions. I did notice that I tend to overuse dialog tags. Now, this is something that the reader may not notice if they only read the book once, but after you've read a story through fifty times (and this is probably not an exaggeration!) those things tend to pop out at you. I deleted a few and changed a few, but most of them I left as they were. The next book should reflect a more sparing use of them, but when you've got six characters in a scene, they're tough to avoid.

Now it's back to writing Renegade, which was originally due the end of June, but my editor made a comment at RT that I may have more time, which is a good thing. She finally realized that having all manuscripts for a season due at the same time makes no sense because she can't read them all at once. I know how it feels on this end; I bust my ass getting it done on time, and she doesn't get around to reading it for another two months. Sometimes I'm actually finished on schedule, but there have been times when I could have used those extra weeks to smooth things out a bit more. Still at some point you must say, "It's finished!" and be done with it.

And I am. Yay!!!!!