Gather ’round, friends, it’s story time. Last Wednesday night I was minding my business and winding down from a D&D session when Aleister (my Order of Crows series main character) whispered to me, “I know how to fix that scene.”
What scene, you might ask? Oh, just the big-deal culmination of the first three books scene. The one I’ve known needed fixing but not how to do it. Also the revisions I was sure were going to still need fixing when I get my cover in five (Five? Only five?) months.
Two things here. One, if you’re not a writer you may not know what it’s like to try to ignore a noisy character. Think toddler with a set of cymbals who says, “Hey, mom,” between every crash. The short story is you can’t. So I didn’t try.
Two, this book has been, hands down, the hardest one I’ve ever written. No lie I started writing this book no less than five times. I can call this the third draft but the truth is closer to a gazillion.
So, can you guess where I’ve been for the last week? If you have ‘full-on obsessive mode’ on your bingo card, you win. It’s always a crap shoot whether characters will stick around after they successfully instigate a situation. Aleister was not playing. We wrote, deleted words, and wrote some more. I’ll be damned, he really did know how to fix that scene, too. He knew how so well that I rewrote twelve-thousand words into eight-thousand words and now my total word count is too low compared to the first two books. But that’s another issue to address on the next read through.
So now I have a huge hurtle cleared that I wasn’t expecting to clear, and I’m looking at that January cover in a different light. Can I have this book ready to publish? Considering I just released a book last month, how crazy would I be to try to do another one six months later? With two book events, my kid’s birthday, the holiday season, and an editing job coming back my way for a second round between now and January … am I that crazy?
I might be. The way I see it, if I don’t hit that January goal it’s not a failure. Hardly. It will still be a success because I’m still going to publish that book regardless. Why not try for a possibly-unrealistic goal of sooner than later? Buckle up, folks, we’re going for a ride.
Aj Elmore, Author 