Reinventing the drawing board...wait, what?

Just kidding. We're not reinventing the wheel or going back to the drawing board over here, but Only One is getting seriously revamped. And probably then eviscerated after that fact. If you were a first reader, by the time the book is published, it won't look the same. Oh, the plot will still be the same, but so much will have changed structurally, aesthetically. There will be loads of scenes that didn't exist in the draft you saw and a bunch of stuff that was cut from that version.

One of my weaknesses as a writer - and let me say that any writer who professes to have no weaknesses is either lying or full of it - is that I like to tell a story. That doesn't sound bad, does it? Except, to engage a reader, sometimes it's better to show them a story. The funny thing about it is that, when a story is coming out of my head and onto paper, it's playing like a movie in my mind - the ultimate 'showing' of a story. So, I'm working on that. It's one of the major changes to the manuscript. So far, it has resulted in a boost to page and word count. Which translates to CUT, CUT, CUT! It's still nowhere near as voluminous as the first few drafts of Back to December, but I'm sure it's not done being cut, and I'm still finessing the show/tell stuff. I think it's making for a better story overall.

The goal is to produce a better product so that readers will want to not only read my work, but will want to tell their friends all about it. Because I want people to keep coming back and read the rest of this series. So, between edits to Only One and my marketing class, I've got a lot on my plate (besides the usual life stuff that happens when you're a mother of two school-aged children, have a husband who expects dinner on the table and clean laundry, and run a household. Ayuh).

I'm still shooting for a pre-Thanksgiving launch of Only One, but depending on how long this phase takes, it might push Right Here Waiting a lot further into 2014 than I'd hoped. It's all good! I want to be a better writer. Better writers have happier readers.

So, keep telling your friends about Back to December, write happy, positive reviews wherever you can, and just know that it'll only get better from here!