Finished

Well, I finally made it to The End. That darn Sicilian hero didn’t give in easily though. For one moment I thought he was never going to get to that admission of a love that I knew he felt, that he knew he felt, that his heroine started to suspect he felt – but he just wasn’t saying!

But he got there in the end. And he and his heroine have declared their love and headed of, not into a sunset, but off to my editor’s desk. I hope she likes them. This is the point at which there is total equality between all authors. Never published, multi-published, or something in between, you send your book off to the editor and then you wait – and you worry. It doesn’t get any easier with each book, in fact, in some ways it gets worse. You are expected to turn in a publishable book. Everyone thinks ‘oh well, you’ve done it before, you’re bound to do it again – it’ll be fine.’ But you, as the author, know it isn’t like that.

A book stands or falls on its own merits. That sounds so obvious, but there are people out there who think that multipublished authors have it easier – that they have some sort of ‘bye’ into publication, no matter how good or bad their book is. I wish!

No, I don’t. I value my editor and her input. I value the fact that she is a cool, rational reader a reader who is distanced from my book and so can see if it works or not. I get so involved with my story, I get caught up in the characters’ lives and feelings and problems and motivations that I can get way too close to them and their story. I can think I’ve said something the right way when in fact I haven’t. I can think I’ve made things perfectly clear when in fact I’ve made them confusing – or overwritten them so that the poor reader thinks. ‘But you said this already! Again and again!’

I want to write the best possible book I can. I want to tell my characters’ stories in the best way I can to get across their personalities and their worries and their conflict and its resolution . I’ve done what I hope is a good job – now I need an editor’s cool eye on my book to tell me if I have. I don’t want any sort of ‘bye’ into the next round –e into publication. If things need revising or rewriting or tweaking then I’ll do it – that’s being professional. And being professional, I know I’m only as good as my next book, Not the one that’s on sale right now. I know that worked, I know people love it (Thank you to everyone who’s written to tell me so!) But I need to prove I can do it again . . .and again.


I never ever want to sit back and think ‘I’ve got this writing thing cracked’ – because as soon as you do that then the genre or the readers or just plain fashion does a seismic shift and if you aren’t careful what used to work no doesn’t work at all. Or you’ve misread the current market, or people have just had way too many of the sort of story you’ve written – or, worse still, you’re just repeating yourself over and over.

So the end of a book is both a wonderful feeling and a time of great tension. It’s a great relief to think you’ve completed another manuscript, that you’ve told a story, from the beginning to the middle and finally the end – and created the needed 55,000 words to do so. And you hope it’s a book that will please first your editor and then the readers who pay out their hard-earned money to buy it in the future. And you chew your nails as you wait to hear from your editor . . .

Every time I do it, I feel like I’ve sent out a little piece of myself – or one of my ‘babies’ – out into the big world and I don’t know if that world will be welcome or hostile. But I’m always glad I feel this way. I believe that feeling sure it’s okay is risky – it can lead to complacency and complacency can lead to laziness – and that can lead to bad writing and writing a bad book. One that a reader feels she wasted her money on buying. And I never, ever, want to do that.