Anniversaries, travel, and rejection

I got a lot of crap for being so bundled up
(that's two coats and two sweaters plus my
scarf!) but what can I say? I'm half Filipino.
Any time it's less than 70 out I'm freezing.

I'm slowly climbing back into a regular writing schedule after taking most of July off for a few oh-shit-summer-is-almost-over-we-need-to-go-somewhere trips. After a week at the beach with the kids in South Carolina, we went up to Chicago for a few days. After that I flew out
to see my best friend Shannon in California for a few days, and then Hubs joined me and we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary a mere one month before our 11th with a trip to San Francisco (without the kids!).

Hubs and I have been together for 16 years, married for 11. We met on the first day of college our freshman year, and the rest is history. Part of what makes us work so well is our shared passion for social justice and our quirky and dark sense of humor. This week he's been in Seattle for business, and his trip got off to a bit of a rocky start when he had to rush a colleague to the emergency room after they went out for a meal together and the guy had an allergic reaction to something and went into anaphlactic shock. He stayed in the waiting room after the doctors took the guy upstairs, and a few hours later a nurse came down to get him. His colleague had given them Hubs' name as his person, and the nurse and doctors made the assumption they were a couple and had Hubs come up to be briefed on his condition and care instructions.

Anyone who's read The Buyout knows it's a very similar situation to the one Parker and Mason found themselves in, and once we knew his colleague was going to be okay, I pointed that out to him. His response pretty much sums up why I've put up with him for 16 years. He just gets me.

Somewhere in that whirlwind of travel I managed to eek out about 19K for my Christmas-themed novella Late Bloomer. It was rejected for the Dreamspinner Press Advent calendar anthology earlier this month, but I'm still in love with the story, so I've submitted it as a standalone novella. Cross your fingers!

After a month of being a nomad, it was a bit of a shock to the system to come home and have the Bub start first grade a few days later. We're back on a brutal (for a night owl like me) schedule of 6 a.m. wake-ups, and I'm not adjusting well.

Being home has given me time to get back to buckling down and focusing on writing. Edits have started on my novel Island House, which is scheduled for release in November. It feels good to be back in the literary saddle, so to speak. The Barnacle doesn't start preschool til after Labor Day, though, and the poor thing just mainlined about sixteen episodes of Jake and the Neverland Pirates on Netflix while I was in the zone focusing on my first-round publisher edits. Oops.




 

Editing and the EDJ

Things are plugging along for me, despite the Evil Day Job's best attempts at getting me off track. I'm a freelance journalist, so most of the time after a long day of interviews and writing the last thing I want to do is write more, but I'm trying hard to get past that. Having the daily word count goal I set at the Dreamspinner Author Workshop in April has been a big help.

I just finished the first round of edits on my latest novella The Buyout, which will be published by Dreamspinner Press later this year. My first instinct when I see one of my manuscripts all marked up is to cringe at all the mistakes I made and all the plot holes I left (or the number of times I changed a character's eye color or the city they lived in or, on one memorable occasion, getting the character's name wrong...not misspelled, just flat out wrong).

As a journalist, I'm used to having my pieces torn apart. What I'm not used to is having those ripped up pieces sent back to me, asking me to sign off on the changes and revise in areas--we journos usually work on a tight deadline that doesn't allow for that kind of dialogue between writer and editor. To be honest, I kind of prefer it that way.

This is the third story I've taken through production at Dreamspinner, and I have to say that my experiences with the editors has been top-notch. Their comments are insightful and they never fail to make my stories tighter, clearer, and better when we come out the other side of the editing tunnel. That said, the editing process is still a nerve-racking one, and my conversations with authors who are much more seasoned than  me leave me to believe that the initial roller coaster ride of self-pity and horror that accompanies getting that first edit back is never going to change. 

It's not that I'm not open to the criticism, because I am. The editors ultimately have the same goal I do--to make that story the best it can be. And like I said, once I've reworked paragraphs in accordance with their notes or changed the wording or sentence structure the way they've suggested, I always walk away from it feeling like that story is better for it.

But any feedback that isn't open gushing about your story--your baby, the piece you've reared from infancy and spent many a late night with--is hard to hear. I think that experience makes us better writers, though. And the work editors do with us definitely makes the books better in the end, and that's what should matter.

How do you deal with the editing process? Do you have any tips to share with a newbie?