deborahjross | Entries tagged with revising

Last night I sent off the revisions for The Heir of Khored , the final book of The Seven-Petaled Shield trilogy. Am feeling very pleased with it. That wonderful feeling of reading your own work and thinking, "Wow, I really nailed that scene!" So, elation but also exhaustion. As you can tell from my (well, partly deliberate) sentence fragments.

What do you do when you've been working on a project for what seems like forever (7 years) and it's finally done. Out of your hands. Fini. (I still have to do page proofs, but the essential work is done.) Some writers go on vacation. Kick back, get a massage or twelve, watch all the seasons of Eureka, go out to dinner, etc. Others sit around and mope, wondering what to do with themselves. One very fine writer of my acquaintance gets depressed until she starts the next project.

Me, I have a list of things I've put on hold during the crash and burn deadline period. I've written out a few things, pinned the paper to my bulletin board. I stare at it, my mind bereft of ideas as to how to accomplish the tasks. I think that state of blankness is about par for the course. The thing is, when we pour ourselves into a project, particularly one with a a deadline so it's not only all-encompassing creatively but in terms of how many hours it eats up every day, and then it's over, it's as if we've been pushing a very large, very very heavy object and it suddenly slides out from under us. Falls off a cliff. Disappears into another dimension (aha! PublisherLand!) I feel like a cartoon character staring into the void where my book used to be.

As much as I want to dive into the creative projects I set aside because of the deadline, I also need to take care of the void inside of me. ( Read more... )

Since Northlight is on sale for $1.00 off at Book View Cafe, here from the archives is some background on how I wrote this book.

After I submitted Jaydium, which was to become my first published novel, I began work right away on my next project. Or rather, I took a look at all the ideas and characters which were screaming inside my skull to be made into stories and tried to decide which one would cause me the most anguish if I didn't work on it first. High on my list was to rewrite the last novel I'd written before Jaydium. It had received careful attention, not to mention three single-spaced pages of critical feedback, from the editor who would later buy Jaydium.

I felt that if an editor had taken that much time and trouble with the book, there was something of value, something that perhaps I was now a good enough writer to bring out fully.

The book's working title was Weiremaster, and it was based on the world of my very first professional short story, "Imperatrix", which appeared in the debut Sword & Sorceress anthology. Weires are bipedal ape-like creatures, seven-feet tall, fanged, silver-furred, immensely powerful and receptively telepathic. In the world of "Imperatrix," they obey people of imperial blood. For the purposes of that short story, no further explanation was needed.

Now, years later, my world-building had matured. I wanted to know how these creatures had come into a human world, how the control worked, and how the dynastic characteristic had been established. I concocted an adventure which would lead my hero into the world of the Weires and back home again, changed. He would carry me -- and the reader -- along with him, a classical hero-quest.

( Read more... )

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Deborah's Journal

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Entries tagged with revising

Deadline Burnout Burbles

The story-behind-the-story of NORTHLIGHT

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