Summer Writing Journal - Entry #4

Well, I can't say I've had an overly productive writing week. We got back from vacation late last Sunday (And we're actually heading out again this morning!) and with the Fourth in the middle of the week, things in the writing world got pushed to the back burner.

On the other hand, it's been a pretty exciting writing week.

I was 'chatting' with my editor via e-mail on Monday and we got to discussing "An Unexpected Blessing". The mss was still in the senior editor's hands, and she had a couple of questions. Namely, the age of the characters was throwing her off. And no wonder...I totally did the math wrong somewhere along the lines and they were fifteen years older than I'd intended them to be. Once I realized the issue, I admitted the mistake and said I had no problem changing that.

On Wednesday (Happy belated Fourth!) I had an e-mail from her saying we were good to go on a contract! Yippie! (So now you can uncross the fingers on one hand.)

From me she needed the timeline to be fixed and the heat between the couple to be 'amped up.' Originally I planned to get her the revisions after I returned from vacation next week, but I got my ducks in a row and sent off the changes yesterday. I figured that would put us a week ahead of the game. The age thing was easy to fix, I simply had to change the phrases about 'thirty years ago' to 'fifteen years ago'. (Seriously...good thing I don't need to do extensive math for a living.) As for 'amping up the heat', I did a read-through and it seemed pretty hot to me, but I added some moments of awareness and more physical reactions to several scenes. Hopefully this is what she was looking for in that area. If not, I'm sure she'll let me know!

I also heard back from the other editor at Wild Rose, thanking me for the re-submission of "This Feels Like Home" and saying I'd hear back from her no later than September on that. (So one hand still needs fingers crossed!)

What with the holiday in the middle of the week and the usual rounds of blog posts and comments and doing the above revisions, I didn't get any work done on my WIP, but that's okay. There's still a whole lot of summer left!

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com