Simmering

Second draft zooooooms

and now

it has to simmer

shhhh

do not rattle and roll

tiptoe away.

Maybe when you return

to the draft

it will have developed

multiple reflective layers

and lead you

gently

on to the 

next

one.

xx

Second Draft

Sono in giardino

means

I'm in the garden.

It's a sign I often saw

hung on doors 

in spring and summer

in Montagnola, Switzerland.

I'm deep now into a second draft

of the newest book

doing a lot of planting and weeding

of words.

Sono in giardino

hangs on the office door.

xx

(P. S. If you click on 'giardino' in the column at far right, you'll see a similar post with this sign from 2010, but in that instance, it meant I was taking a break! )

Transitions

So one day it was like this

(above)

all dozy mesmerizing autumn

and

two days later 

giant nor'easter

blows into town

lashing power lines

and blasting trees

and yet

amid the

no heat

no water

no power

these candles

allowed me to 

write

straight through

to the

ending

of a first draft

oh yeah

that felt soooo good.

You writers out there

will know the feeling,

mm?

xx

Drafts

Above:

three years of work

six drafts

of one book:

The Great Unexpected

(due out 4 September)

By the time

I reach this phase

it's a bit like having been pregnant

for ten months

maybe eleven

and I am thinking

I did the best I could do

I love it

but

GET IT OUTTA HERE!

xx

Revisions, Copy-Editing and all that Jazz

A Bigga Mess

Closing in on last tweaks before the book is set in galleys (pages that look like book pages.) Bigga mess on desk.  It has gone something like this, over the past two years:

Write several drafts, submit to editor, receive feedback; revise, resubmit, feedback, tweaking. Ms. 'approved' and goes to copy editor and then comes back to me with questions. Fix it, resubmit, a few more tweaks, off it goes again to be set in galleys.

[Meanwhile:  begin first draft of next book.]

Meanwhile:  talks with editor regarding cover art and interior art  (that begins shortly after editor first sees manuscript, and is ongoing until book is ready for publication.)

Next: first-pass galleys will arrive in a month or two and we'll all (me, editor, etc.) proofread.  Tweak. Fix.

While we're doing that, marketing and publicity and sales departments are ramping up with their expertise.

Then:  second-pass galleys arrive; proofread, tweak, fix.  

[Meanwhile: continue writing drafts of next book.]

Sometimes another final pass (of first book) comes to me.  

Final art arrives. 

Advance review copies are printed (up to four or five months in advance of publication).

[Finish next book drafts; submit to editor; receive feedback; revise .  . .]

About eleven months from now:  publication day of the book that's the bigga mess on desk above.

Ta da!

Soon I will disclose the . . . title.

Drafts, Lake and Trees

In the third draft of the book in progress, I ruthlessly cut a hundred pages and made the pages messy but the story neater. Yesterday I printed out a clean fourth draft: so nice to have clean margins and pristine pages.  Now I'm going through this draft slowly, seeing if is whole yet.

Meanwhile, the outside is calling, calling:

Gorgeous out there!  So I work for two hours and then go outside for a bit.

The dock is out, but the kayak is merely resting, waiting for me.

Back inside, I work for another couple hours and then dare to look out the window:

Guess I'd better get back out there. Maybe those trees and leaves and lake will make their way into the story. Maybe the Deep Significance of the story will come to me as I'm paddling the kayak. Or maybe not.

The Colors of a Draft

I use pastel colored paper for manuscript drafts; it feels more tentative and fluid than white. It also gives me a visual record of when parts of a draft were done.

In the above stack, the gold pages (approximately 100) were written between May-July, 2009. The blue were written between August-December, 2009 (only about 30 pages because I was on book tour and in England during that time.) The green pages are the most recent (about 100), written in my recent immersion in North Carolina.

I'm not done yet, and the draft is exactly that: a draft. It's like the frame of a house without the windows in it. No paint yet. No electricity. Definitely no granite countertops.  Lots more work to do in subsequent (and new-color) drafts.

The colors help my memory. If I need to quickly refer back to an incident, I can remember when I wrote that scene and what color paper it is on, and I can find it easily.

The final draft (maybe 2 or 3 drafts from now) will be all white and pristine.  Subsequent revisions will be on colored paper to easily identify where changes were made.  I guess I like things fairly orderly; otherwise writing a book and keeping all the details straight might make me crazy.